


Refuge For Resolve

by ClockworkRainbow



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, So You Kind Of Ruined Everything For Everyone Including Yourself But Now You're Alive Again, character study of a deeply dysfunctional shrimp, post-game but PK is alive again, spoilers for godmaster endings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 32,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27011317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkRainbow/pseuds/ClockworkRainbow
Summary: For a god whose entire life came, and went, in the service of a kingdom for which no cost was too great, the hardest part is outliving everything he strived for.The second hardest part is choosing to stay that way.
Comments: 41
Kudos: 161





	1. The Refuse And Regret Of Its Creation

**Author's Note:**

> more detailed content warnings:  
> \- gore  
> \- body horror  
> \- death, both of people and animals  
> \- suicidal ideation  
> \- child abuse and death  
>   
> please proceed informed and with caution  
> ABOUT THE OC TAG:  
> this work features an original character deuteragonist belonging to a good friend of mine. Her story runs concurrently to PK's and while they are largely distinct, they will overlap and engage with one another at several points. If you enjoy this fic, please [look to my friend's fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27155332/chapters/66318142) which covers the same events from the other character's perspective.

In soundless fathom beneath the earth, wyrm dreamed.

Sometimes it dreamed of empty places, and in those dreams they were untouched by time- split stone eggs that it could not have pressed its coils into any longer and towering shapes that were not mountains but just as still. The ancients lay where they fell. Wind nor time could crumple their hides; theirs was the slow death of immortal things, fossilized alive until consumed by aching slowness, until the heavy head struck sanded earth and rested, never to rise again.

Wyrm knew this, but it had never seen the ancient ones alive.

Sometimes it dreamed instead of shining things to be shaped precisely by dexterous grip. In these dreams the scale warped, twisted, folded down and wyrm folded down on itself, made shapes that it nearly remembered, fingers and hands, held and conducted and shaped and cut and worked until it thought the digits might break, and yet it did not mind the work. Choral hymns rose in manifold voices, formed a dizzying cloud around its head, and the shining patterns twisted awry, the clutching hands stumbled-

-why did they persist, such voices? What things did they want? Time and time again, it chased the dream back to the root, the shapes, the work, but they did not take form. The noise was troubling. Wyrm dangled as hook on line, towed back towards something.

And then the dream was of the dark, and it was nearly soothing, and nearly frightening. In the dark was a space to work, a space away from the voices, the sounds- in the dark wyrm could find the thing that it was looking for, the important one, the reason it had cast away into this space; it could make sense, if only they were not so loud, so demanding, so insistent-

- _what did they want from him that he had not already given-_ _what was left of him that could be given-_

He writhed in place, swam against the tide of dizzying places and crumbling strands, of holy shapes wrought by madmen’s fingers, of wrought-iron fencing posts tangled together by rope or sinew or thrust in yielding earth, the shape repeated, burnt into his mind, burnt into his flesh, four thrust points, like a jaw, like a crown-

Something scorned him, in the haze, a half-distant light, beheld and not, present and future, burning to behold but a pinprick in the eye that could not be escaped, in empty places, in shining things, and too in the dark-

And then She was not. And then She screamed.

And then in the dark something screamed louder, in not a voice but hurricane silence, in destruction, in the deepest shadows pouring like rain from golden clouds, a black hole torn in the sky where the sun had once shone and it _howled_ in a feeling that struck him with a great, thronging reverberation.

There was no altar, there was no shape, no invocation, no chatter around his head- but as sure as if he had been gored on a spike, when the sensation retracted, he dragged with it, fell, through the space of light and machines and someone who had been there, a too-familiar white face and black eyes.

His last thought as he fell was that he should know that silence, but he did not.

\--

**CHAPTER I: THE REFUSE AND REGRET OF ITS CREATION**

\--

From an exterior perspective, the creature who was once a king supposed, lying on the floor in a disarrayed heap of limb and robe, while horribly undignified, could pass as peaceful.

And really, there was not a more succinct way to put it, even as he rectified his posture. It would have been a futile toil to try and explain to anyone the exact sensation of being pitched at a raw angle somewhere out of a state of expanded delirium rather like someone might throw a child’s ball that they held in extensive disdain.

The faint light of the throne room disappeared behind the palms of his uppermost appendages, and he made some attempt at organizing his thoughts beyond the sense of rattling heavily around his own body. Eventually, gradually, the sensation stilled, enough that he judged himself fit to look at a light without headache.

He could conclude from the settling silence of his surroundings that court was not in session, and no sooner had the thought risen that it immediately retreated back the way it had come under the awareness that it was a very dull thought to have. They were not here, naturally, for many reasons.

The secondary concern, which was less stupid, was that ‘here’ was not somewhere he was supposed to be either. Although, certainly, until very recently he had been localized to the throne room, within the palace, it had been a far more secure location than any physical stronghold. But _this_ room- the chair itself bore deep cracks. With an inquisitive leg, he was able to lever a chunk of damaged floor out of its position, and tip it over, where it skittered and tumbled over the rest of its surface and spun to a stop, in a way that real stones certainly do, and a way that dream-constructs, however exhaustively rooted in memory, do not.

There was also a hole in the ceiling, which wouldn’t do. 

He squinted at the gap, the cavern gloom of a higher floor through it, and nearly made the mistake of jumping ineffectively for the opening before he firmly reminded himself that he had not taken his wings with him into exile.

From his vantage point, he could conclude that most of an upper gallery had crashed down from above. A following hypothesis: this was going to compromise leaving the structure.

That he had to leave was an unfortunate necessity. While it wouldn’t do to give any potential onlooker the wrong idea, something had sabotaged him, and whatever that was had breached his dreams to do so, and hadn’t the decency to stand forth and make its demands clear. 

He was also in a horribly unbecoming state of a king. Dust had settled into his joints, to creak and shed as he attempted to shake them loose, and his robe had rotted at the hemline, leaving it scandalously close to betraying segments of ivory chitin even at rest.

The robe could not be addressed, but the dust, at least he might do something about- and needed to, before he was fit to go demand answers of whatever lay beyond. He opened a vein of power, focused until it permeated his body evenly, and then released in a single bright flash, expulsing unworthy residue from his person in a smooth stroke.

No sooner had it dissolved, however, than he found himself staggered with a wave of nausea. As an exertion, it should have been child’s play; he could not possibly have deteriorated so far, so quickly..?

…Had it been?

He… had no idea how much time had passed.

With a brisk hand, he composed himself. No matter. He would find no answers languishing in a ruin like an invalid. If he could not fly, he would simply walk.

And walk he did. Through ruined colonnade and crumbled theatre, past a hallway half-blocked by a large ornamental planter that had shattered on its side, spilling its contents across the stones. Those contents were now little more than brittle stems and wilted leaves that crumpled to dust at his touch. Arched windows gave glimpses of skeletal trees framed by limp and lifeless ivy.

The movement of years could have done this, possibly. It could alternatively have been a property of either drawing the palace into the dream structure, or the violence that seemed to have brought about its collapse.

Either way, there would be no saving these. They may have been eligible, perhaps, for a new life as kindling, but there was not the faintest bloom of soul remnant in their stems.

The elevator he came to proved nonfunctional, its platform barely visible in three pieces at the bottom of the shaft. But the walls itself were strong, and continued all of the way to the bottom, as directly- if not as conveniently- as when the device was operational.

He let his gaze drift between the wall and the shattered platform.

At very least, he reminded himself, there was no one here to witness their king scurrying about like a base creature. The ornamental carvings proved more than adequate footing, though the tatters of his robe required negotiation and resettling at the bottom of the shaft.

Here on the ground floor the palace was truly forgetting itself, overtaken in spurts by the spiraling fossilstone of the Ancient Basin. The stillness of the air was even interrupted by the familiar scratching of a shadow creeper, bolder than its fellows, inching a fearless path back and forth along a ruined pillar.

An indescribable feeling seized him at the sight of the movement, one that he placed a moment later and was unable to muster response to besides a self-pitying sigh. How long had it been since he had set fang on another beast? Was _hunger_ the level he presently stooped to? He supposed this at least explained the humiliating dwindling of his own soul, where something as simple as cleaning himself off was a demand.

Regardless, now that he had its attention, this primal sentiment would not be settled by anything save appeasement. He advanced on the creeper, which did not even so much as eye him in suspicion. If it were capable of such thoughts, none of its kind that he had ever witnessed ever stirred from the placidity by which it wandered for anything.

A single strike to the middle of its back broke it cleanly, and it died soundless yielding watery and bluish blood. He pressed his thumbs into the opening and wrenched it open, scrutinizing its entrails in detail and finding no indication of the plague.

This one was lucky, then, though its fortunes went to him now. He made quick work of it, preferring not to dwell on the details, and simply flung the remains of its shell aside when he was sated. The back of one hand rose to his mouth, found the distracting presence of moisture, and came away with a barely vocalized note of scorn.

While the sensation of consumed flesh in his stomach was distracting, it had, admittedly, settled him, and he could dedicate his attention elsewhere. The crumbled gate at the entrance of the structure was attended as it had been when he had left it, although what had formerly been a resting kingsmould in ordered dormancy was now little more than a broken heap of pale armor. He crouched to turn over what remained of the cuirass, only to find it anchored firmly in place by branching stalks of a perfect black that his light could not dissuade or disperse. They branched in a ring from the body, and, cautiously turning over the pauldron betrayed that they had invaded the matrix of the armor itself, dividing into hair-fine threads that sought any imperfection in the steel.

The abyss had taken it then. He supposed even his creations, in their perfect diligence, could nonetheless wither without tiring. He lifted his gaze from the corpse to the labyrinth it had contained, the once-proud body of the palace lying much the same as its former host, the spine and ribs of its arches and pillars jutting brokenly through the flesh of walls and rooves... he contemplated that perhaps the same forces had left it so.

It was a foolish thought. The abyss was the only truly peerless entity within Hallownest; in it was the power to ravage all creation down to the merest residue. Unn’s scathing lament could be negotiated or simply denied altogether by the right tools and materials, but nothing could truly halt the void but its own placid nature. Even its rages were only as powerful as waves on its surface.

And whatever had elected to strike down the palace- strike down _him_ , from where he was drifting- showed specificity of target. To his left, not more than ten paces of a larger bug from the palace’s ruin, the bridge that spanned the chasm was not merely intact but immaculate as the day he had left it; its six attending lights standing tall, and each individual glass globe within the fixture was whole and lit, their metal casings shining. Beyond them, faintly, the warped, dark roots that jutted from the wall showed unblemished in the diffuse glow.

He passed beneath them, and with some difficulty made the small jump down the shallow, ruined pass that separated the palace grounds from the rest of the basin.

Here there was a purity to the stillness, one unmarred by settling dust or crumbled ruin. It showed little age. Where the path dipped to a whorl of shining spikes or plunged straight down to the mouth of the Abyss, he could navigate on the recalled afterimages of his own travels in the past- the same footholds he had taken the scattered occasions throughout time that had brought him away from the palace. There was serenity to the repetition and it steadied his thoughts.

Until he came to a larger gap, its teeth gleaming. A gap he would have flown across- but now there were no sides that could be scaled. The space gaped open in both directions. He backtracked towards one of the higher vertical shafts he’d passed and looked upwards.

Not ideal.

His only option regardless.

What followed was the further indignity of evaluating exactly how much of his weight he could balance on his rearmost legs to reach above, stretching his full length to grasp the lowest of the ancient stones, and then, when grip secured, a scrabble he scarcely wanted to think about to pull the rest of his length onto the wall. A shadow creeper crawled past him, its vitreous eye inscrutable in its judgment of his capabilities.

Perhaps, scratching his own way up the wall, it simply imagined him an overlarge off-colored specimen of its own kind, if it thought of him at all.

This shaft surmounted in a low platform, and he passed from that to the next shaft and its modestly higher landing with less effort, able to secure some footing on a metal bracework that held it open.

Something crinkled underfoot; he paused, retreated fully off it, and then crouched to pick it up. A sheaf of parchment, its color bright in the glow cast by the nearby lamp. On it, in a sketchy but certain hand, someone had made notes. The subject in question, a fountain bearing his likeness- the prayer fountain within the Basin itself. He could spot another fragment of paper on a ledge too far for him to reach- but he recalled the Basin’s layout impeccably. A shorter jump and a manageable reach from a different position could let him access the landing from above.

He folded the parchment, tucked it in the grip of one of his less urgently needed limbs, and set off.

\--

A practical plan proved nonetheless tedious in execution. After nearly losing his footing to a second creeper, he rebuked its intrusion with a flare of magic, and had to halt and steady himself having actually reached the upper precipice before he could make the jump.

For all that, he was rewarded by the revelation of not the one paper he’d glimpsed from below but a pile of them, littered as if they’d dropped from the overburdened arms of a careless retainer. Sketches of other sections of the basin- detailed renderings of the shapes of the bracing and the whorls of ancient stone. Among them, an oddity- a rather detailed likeness of a slender bug whose long, curling antennae were gathered at the back of the head, peering forwards with alert eyes.

He gathered the papers. Much as it was inevitable, it pained to consider that sections of the populace had stooped to careless littering. And for that there were no particular answers to be afforded. Making sure they were secure but safely away from his upper chest, he settled them in folds and pockets to free his limbs, and then returned to the climb upwards.

The prayer fountain was, after all, right above him, and someone had sought to capture its image for he presumed a reason.

The area around the fountain base was untouched and clean. But the fountain itself- its spout protruded from its chest nakedly like an impaling spike, the vessel that had caught the water missing entirely. Looking down into the stagnant water he could see someone had made quite a large contribution indeed- large enough to block the drain at the bottom and thus choke the pipe that way.

Consulting the paper, however, depicted the fountain whole and flowing… as well as three slumped figures around its base.

With a more discerning eye, he swept the area again. Nothing- no, not _quite_ nothing. A shadow on the stones, corporeal enough to not be dispersed by his light as he approached it.

He crouched, hesitated, and then pressed fingertips to the edge of the stain, driving a pulse of light through it.

The mass exploded- a whirl of lashing appendages struck outwards, threw him back- he connected sharply with the side of the arch, and darkness overtook him.

\--


	2. Shadow Dreams

There was something in the dark with him. His light cast weakly on gilded metal, a hunched shape with some sort of broad, spade-shaped crest. Details were otherwise indistinct- its back lay to him, clad in either tattered wings or tattered cape, of material so fine and dusty that the distinction blurred. Words- a sort of babble, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but on second audience it was perhaps a chant of some kind, or a song- bubbled up from the creature’s throat and drifted into the air.

Beyond that he could see nothing. The darkness extended around him in all directions, such that his light felt pressed down onto his shell.

He could expand, perhaps, with centuries’ worth of growth, with the ancient blood that ran cold inside of him, and never reach the end of that darkness, nor pierce it meaningfully even if he lunged like a thrown spear for miles in one direction.

This was Void.

Neither warm nor cold, not present but inescapable, not offering resistance, but indomitable.

And yet it was not still. Not the abyssal depth he knew, had once plunged a great stone working as deep into it as he could reach and drew it out to study the imprint left upon it, one of alien eddies and ripples but an abiding tranquility- no, shapeless and soundless in this darkness there was a moving riptide. It tore at them equally as it passed- he and the hunched thing- hurtled them sidelong, might have flung them against rocks or outcropping if such things existed- and then settled, or retreated, only to pass again.

This was not his dream. His attention seized on the hunched figure, made a forceful movement of his tail to try and draw closer. There was nothing under his tail or legs- nothing to hold or grasp but he drifted forwards sluggishly.

“-holy, most divine, permit Us,”

He caught a handful of its cloak. “You. You need to wake up.” Besides the riptide, there was a current here, too- Void poured off of this being.

“God of Gods, o God of Gods, o Devourer, o fearful eternity-”

This time, when the current swept it swept with such force it nearly threw them apart. The darkness stretched, warped, seized around them, and for a moment he saw shimmering glimpses through it- an empty chamber aglow with white light, a crumbling and broken spike thrust against the air, some caravan of pilgrims hunched to the labor of carrying a cart or swaying crooked staves- and they were gone, and Void was absolute. As it should be. As it should not have been able to deviate from.

“We bequeath Our all, Our shell, Our mind-”

He tightened his grip, pushed with force. “You-”

It did not heed him- it did not face him, seemed even irreverent where his grasp ate through the material of its cloak and burned a pattern of bright frost on the shell of its back.

The Void-tide hurtled through again, and he lost, spiraled, was thrown and dashed-

Dashed against a solid face- surfaced, in the air of the Ancient Basin, in the shadow of the prayer fountain, as if coming up to breathe, and for a moment he was driven forwards, hands pressed on the stone, coughing and retching until enough of the shadow had left his body.

\--

**CHAPTER II: SHADOW DREAMS**

\--

When he composed himself, he destroyed the ichor with a wipe of one hand. It did not fight him as the other specimen had- the specimen that was now missing, leaving behind not true Void but its mortal residue. Similar traces lingered in two other places.

He re-gathered the papers that had fallen from him in his moment of senselessness. Consulted the fountain drawing one more time.

While the image was not in color, sketched with simple ash-ink, he thought he recognized the lines and peaks of the corpses’ hats. The position of the bodies corresponded to the stains.

Sensibly, one would chase this behavior to its source with haste.

And yet.

He had seen it only for a moment but he was certain one of the holes in the void had shown him the black egg temple.

Had shown it… empty.

Before he had awoken, She had screamed. Something had reached Her, from Her perch atop the dark throne that had been her prison- and such a thing could only be achieved through Her silent warden.

Could only be achieved if the seal had been breached.

That took every priority.

He set himself to the earth and climbed.

\--

The going was arduous and frankly debasing. Simply to proceed a relatively short distance- the fountain up to the tram station- was to fight the form that Void imposed upon stone. All of Hallownest, he had concluded from little more than a century of research, had been sea once- the ancientmost fossils that composed its rock were those of swimming creatures. But the basin in particular was loath to forget it. Travelers driven half-mad by the silence had been found, in bygone ages, pressed to the stone insisting in fervent whispers that they heard the roaring of the tide.

Not that he ascribed that particular oddity to the Void. The unromantic reality stood that it was more likely a psychological symptom of adjusting to the dead-still air of the basin. In the castle’s heyday, few of the retainers or servants complained of sounds that were not simply a misidentification of the wind over the stones. But the fact stood, also, that the basin’s stones lay warped in bewildering shapes, cut by flow of long-vanished water, and all the bracing and structure foisted upon it could only do so much to tame such a thing.

As it was inevitable, he would not waste energy contemplating them this much if not for the humiliating fact that he had all of this time to do so. Climbing was exhausting, and he felt weaker than a hatchling grub even with the indulgence of the shadow creeper’s bitter meat sustaining him. Finally surmounting to the tam platform, he caught his breath, firmly, and gathered himself, taking in the environment’s silence.

Dust was a foreign presence to the basin- at least where the palace’s intrusion did not mark its nature. And yet it seemed like no one had been here in some time; the tram lay settled on its wires although not wholly disused, the tunnel doors in both directions were sensibly sealed. Light streamed from aperture above, and to listen carefully there was the diluted echo of the basin’s wind, and the rustle of feeding creatures, small and mindless, overhead.

He could confirm a sidelong suspicion here, and yet something about this platform, even abandoned, was unacceptably public. Descending back into the basin seemed a horrible notion for how difficult it had been to climb- regardless of if it shouldn’t have been, he doubted a second lap would rectify matters-

At the edge of the tunnel. A natural hole, little more than a pockmark in the ground. He advanced to it, studied it- no, a pit, a nesting furrow as if for an animal.

He could not entirely resist raising his eyes to nothing in particular, although they landed on the doors of the tunnel. Was this to be his fate then? If he wished to conduct triage in a beast’s warren, he might as well chase primal instinct all the way to its source and dig his own. At least then he would have some sense it would be clean.

On closer examination, there was not very good footing to climb down. Better to field it all at once.

He… _hopped_ into the pit, landing in the undignified more-or-less bellyflop demanded by a creature with short legs and a long, heavy tail. His only witness was a solitary mawlek, startled to its feet by the arrival and skittering backwards with a warning bray. A flicker in his vision- a pearly image overlaid where he could examine, as if the motion were broken into a series of glass plates laid over a lamp, it crouching, gullet expanding, filling with acid to then spray upon him.

Even lowered and weak, a king was a king, and a mawlek was an aristocrat among vermin at best. When it made to fulfill his prophecy, he sprang, reared, pinned its jaws open with his front set of legs and plunged his hand fingertips-first through the filling acid-sac of its mouth.

Filthy, but efficient. In the moment he withdrew it gurgled, choked, and perished from its own internal fluids; he slackened his grip and let it sprawl, misted lids crawling over its eyes. Once he was certain it was dead, he turned his attention to his hand. This, unlike the creeper, was not clean- troubled motes of orange trembled weakly in a matrix of rusty brown. She had tried to establish herself with greater force here; yet held, lingered.

No doubt building forces for an assault on his palace. For all the good it had done Her; She was never much of a tactician. It had been Her downfall, even as She had stood far more powerful. Even now, he had the small luxury of seeing Her light, gleaming angry in the stains on his arm, ineffectual and easily snuffed out with a weak pass of his own.

“Not today,” he murmured, “and not to you.”

When he was certain his joints were clean, he lifted his attention to the gloomy nest, making certain that no other mawleks sought to advance. They were social creatures, and prone to thronging, but this one, it seemed, was the only one close to the entrance- or else plague madness had consumed the nest and left only one behind.

Either way, he could foresee no ambush, and thus, no reason to set aside his work. The reason he’d ducked into a mawlek warren at all.

It still took disconcerting effort to shed the layers of his robe and study the shameful affliction underneath. Bared to the air, much of his hide gleamed with yet-pure light, the darker connective tissue inconsequential to the shining white plating that had given him name and definition in the earliest times. In all places but the chest, they remained sturdy, of appropriate alignment and shape. He could gently flex the muscles of his tail, let them stand in ridges and fall smooth once again. Their surface was faintly cloudy, compared to where the mawlek’s acid had briefly given his hand a mirror polish- but vanity was not a good reason to scrub oneself with venom meant for liquidating prey. The court could not have tolerated the sight of him now, but in solitude he would have to.

And far greater concern was the wound.

Lacking more precise measuring tools, he compared its diameter to his outstretched fingers. It had expanded nearly a full half-inch in all directions. Taking a single moment to steel himself, he pressed his fingers into the opening until they struck flesh- it had dug deeper into his body, as well. Retrieving his hand, he studied his fingertips. This was poor lighting to evaluate the residue’s color, but he suspected the ratio of light to darkness had shifted, and not in his favor. More testing would be…

… it would not be difficult to acquire samples, considering a fair amount of black ichor had wept down his front. He passed a glowing hand over it, twice, and still came away unsatisfied.

“…Might as well install myself as a replacement to the fountain,”

It was a petty grumble. It was beneath him. But, he supposed it was not the worst indulgence he could seize for himself in the present situation. Regardless, he abstained from further, re-robed, and resigned himself to the graceless ordeal of clambering back _out_ of the mawlek warren, and then, seeing no reason to stop, made for the cautious footholds beside the tram and up out of the basin.

Progress could be marked by the shift in the air. It was closer to city air- cool, humid, and, one could only describe it as _livelier_ than the basin’s deep stillness. The blue armor of a city guard caught his eye- on approach he realized it lay huddled as if sleeping, limp hand yet gripping a lance. Whether plague or beast had been the first culprit, a nail blow beneath the cuirass had laid them to rest a second and final time. An uncertain period since then had desiccated the shell, left it brittle enough the slightest disturbance would have been etched indelibly on what remained.

Beyond…

…The bridge to the city, a grand foyer of costly white stone, was now little more than a handful of broken pillars and, distant enough to be hazy in the lamplit gloom, one end of it protruding as if to taunt him with its insufficient reach. Below was overtaken by scavengers- rustling, writhing gray things that hissed and snapped in anticipation of anything they could find.

Time.

How much time?

How could he have been so careless? So irresponsible? He hadn’t intended to return, but failsafes- _had he really assumed he would be simply allowed to die_ _in this situation_? He should have prepared for this. Should have known.

Had prepared, an internal voice reminded him. Failsafes would suggest a lack of certainty in the Hollow Knight.

The wound ached, an insistent hammering. He settled across from the sentry’s corpse, and made to wait it out.

\--

He may have slept, but probably not. If he had, he expected it probably would have been easier. As it was instead, there simply grew a point where between continuing and staying here, they were about equally disquieting, and he could no longer justify not trying to cross the gap.

The broken pillars still held, albeit in an odd constellation. Their tops were… mostly flat. Enough to hold someone up, potentially. He gauged the distance, and his eye fell upon the teeming creatures below.

The King of Hallownest, whatever else could be said of him, did not quake at lesser creatures.

But he did lift his attention back to the distance, before electing to consider other options. The chasm gaped horizontally, winding through the earth in a way not… entirely unlike a wyrm tunnel he supposed. But it would be no assistance in traversal. The roof of the cavern was a lumpy fossilstone structure interrupted by dangling vines. Unreachable on foot at the majority of its points, but near his position, it bowed low and met a cluster of the shells that found the wall.

He could see places that could hold a solitary foot, or even a few of them…

\--

It was not, ultimately, a perfect solution. It was really more like an agonizing creep that took several hours, but fortuitously, he was rested. Whatever else he could say of the situation- which was infuriatingly little- it seemed to have an infinite amount of time to indulge him and his flagging strength. With the precision of one who had lived in the clouded twilight of wastelands or deep underground, he could tabulate rapidly- it had been some uncertain amount of time since the fall of Hallownest, a _noteworthy_ amount given the level of deterioration in his works…

(Ha. And he thought they would last forever.)

(He thought he would have been around to repair them.)

(Until he hadn’t.)

(This train of thought was meaningless.)

…And approximately a day and a half since his awakening in the palace ruins. At the rate he was moving, he could only hope that whatever _may_ have befallen the black vault was nothing time sensitive.

This malcontent only intensified when he ventured past the foyer to the servants’ elevator, only to find the cage of it lying in crushed and broken form. Weary-eyed, he peered up the length of the shaft, though it achieved no more than reminding himself of a distance he was already too aware of.

Far above, the light of the city shone, framed through a complicated webbing of wooden bracework rotten by moisture and shattered metal glinting razor-sharp. He could see where inventiveness, dexterity, and caution could make use of the collapsed infrastructure- chase a meandering and gap-riddled “stair” up to that distant light.

His limbs already ached for the climbs he had made this far- to say nothing of the pain in his core. But at this point he could feel nearly empty about it all.

He made the first jump. And then again. Further.

The emptiness of the basin… it welcomed such. With the destruction of the bridge and the elevator both, it would be easy to understand if simply no one walked this path. But what did this imply for the state of the city?

A rotted timber that had seemed sure footing gave out, and he swung into empty space, dangled, clung to the wall until he could drag himself back onto stable ground and still his shaking. Shaking. Like a mortal creature that feared a fall.

Logistically, its numbers had to have been reduced by the plague. It was possible they had rebounded, but- they would have rebuilt these passages. Come looking for him.

The more solid half of the broken support he could pull towards him, prop across the space as precarious path to the next landing.

Would they?

He was their king. Their god. Their beacon. Did that mean nothing?

A jump across the space. Overshot. Moving his head at the last minute meant he narrowly avoided running face-first into some of the bristling metal spikes. They sank into his shoulder, bit hard, but steadied him. He found his footing, and extricated himself, pausing to regard his own pale blood on the barbs.

Like a mortal creature, too, he bled now.

Divinity. Royalty. Did this mean anything anymore?

What creature with half a mind would heed something they witnessed scrambling about uselessly in the dark?

Suppose, beyond this space, they _had_ rebuilt. That the city was bright, rekindled, moved on long beyond him. That new light guided them. 

The moths had replaced their god easily enough.

It would merely be an imposition to stumble onto those streets then. Balanced on the narrow walkway, he sat holding his shoulder, hearing nothing but the creak of the cavern settling against its burden of wood, stone, and metal, and the crackle of the fragments that bore his blood freezing over.

…The vault. The state of the plague. It did not matter what else awaited him. He had to know this. No replacement or usurper would carry that ancient history, flashed long before them. If some spark of Her remained, they would not know what to do.

He closed his hand over the torn cloth, dug his claws into his own flesh and focused light until it troubled him no further, stretched the formerly wounded arm and set back to work.


	3. Ozymandias

When he climbed to street level, he was greeted by sheets of pouring rain, and darkened windows as far as he could see. No body moved under the light of the city’s fixtures, nor corpse lay beneath them. Decaying tapestries swayed gently, idly, below alcoves that kept them from the downpour. In the distance, a few doors were cracked ajar- patches of warmth against the gloom. Lamplike red flowers were gathered around one particular aperture, showing sign of recent tending.

He stood consumed by the sight, an emotion he could not understand crawling past the void wound to nest in his throat.

When he finally tore his feet from the stones, it was to put his back to that handful of lit doors, and make the climb instead into the base of the watcher’s spire. As soon as the pressure of the rain abated, he realized he was utterly soaked, fabric that had never been selected for water repellency clinging to his shell.

“Pathetic,” he said only, too tired to take true affront, and proceeded.

The flooring of the spire consumed the sound of his footfalls, albeit in an unwholesome fashion that gave off a distinct odor of decay. He shifted his stance so that it contacted as little of his underbelly as possible, and quickened his pace, skirting an area where a large window had fallen in and torn the velvet in such a way that made the encroachment of mold more obvious. Despite his efforts, the spores tracked onto his tattered hemline. As he moved towards the spire’s receiving room, and the sound of the rain resumed, he took some small consolation that it would probably wash off.

At any point, a part of him expected to explain himself, or come face to face with anyone- of the guard, of the Watch above them, a scribe or clerk or acolyte. The Watcher himself long gone, nonetheless the spire at the heart of the City would not have fallen wholly to disrepair-

-the thought caught in his mind, with the same aftertaste by which he had thought that if Hallownest had survived, it would have come looking for its king somehow.

Somehow, the rain made deeper silence than the echoes of the basin. It consumed the sound, pressed the air down around him. Cold held no threat to him, but warmth, at least, would have meant a difference on his shell…

The plaza at the center of the city lay like a forlorn island ahead, its canals gorged but not yet overflowing. Unbidden, he came to a halt just as its fountain became faintly visible in the deluge.

He knew what it entailed. Knew with a greater certainty than any in Hallownest who had perished there or else fled its destruction. In the grips of worsening affliction, the minutiae of the construction had held his attention as a superstitious fool gripped a holy symbol for deliverance. Each stone petal in the flowers, the positioning of the shells that adjoined them, the detailing on the bowl of the fountain. The three surrounding figures.

The centerpiece.

…Even this had not been spared by time. Fine cracks veined the pauldrons and even the head of the statue. On approach, one line ringed the left horn- if the rain persisted or a sharp impact came to it, the entire horn would simply snap off in time.

A flicker caught his eye- he had leaned slightly over the rim of the fountain to observe its state, and his own light reflected on the water, rippling with the rain and the eddies of the font itself.

He blinked, unsure of what he was observing for seconds that felt too long.

A hand traveled absently up to his face.

Fingertips discovered a fissure. A fault in formerly smooth chitin.

He flinched back from the water, and then again, realizing the sensation of rain ran rivulets into the scar. Would have kept moving back until he fell straight into the canal, if foresight and the lingering remnants of sense hadn’t halted him at the platform’s edge. From that precipice he brought his hands up to his face- the face he had shamelessly shown the world for a day and a half- and let them blot out his sight, as well as the sight _of_ him.

He shouldn’t be here.

He should have noticed- if not the still air of the basin then when it had begun to move-

A droplet of rain settled in the trough between two horns where the crack originated, traveled the length of it to pass his jaw.

His other hands drew his robes tighter about him.

How unsightly.

It suited him.

Without even looking, he could feel the gaze of the statue laid upon him.

He had failed, after all. At every conceivable point. This silent city, neither respectful grave nor fallen bastion, was proof enough of this.

_Bear witness_ , his own words rang to his mind, _to the last and only civilization, the eternal Kingdom._

Unwillingly, he drew his fingers from his eyes. What greeted him in all directions, the cavern vast overhead, the soaring towers rising to meet it. In each window, its own darkness. In each structure, the shape of his ambition, picked bare like the shell of a thing lying desolate in the vastness of time.

_Hallownest_.

Unable to obey his own instructions, he fled that place, its lone sentinel fading into shadow in the rain.

\--

**CHAPTER III: OZYMANDIAS**

\--

Eventually he slowed halfway across a flooded dock. Here at least there was another solitary cadaver, some confirmation this city had once held anyone and anything besides his dreams. Half-suspended in the water, weighted by its own shell, it was a civilian- a beetle, with a lopsided long horn. It clutched something to itself. 

He crouched to retrieve it, thwarted only briefly when the stiffness of its grip required he break the corpse’s limbs to free it. Pulling it back, it revealed itself to be a tablet, its surface coated in slime. Shaking it briskly, and then holding it to the rain, he was disappointed to realize it was no scholarly or official record, but rather a personal journal, the script meandering in unseemly array and an entire third of the stone left unmarked, presumably for further entries that had never come. Stepping lengthwise under the shelter of a higher walkway, he studied the most recent entry.

Hm. The familiar dialect of the city’s commoners, at least. Introspection. Some terse notes about fighting husks- so the city certainly _had_ fallen to the plague-

_Should not have tried to make it alone. Should’ve listened to that bug upstairs, said he had a path right to the storerooms. Fact is, if he is some kind of cult, I’d at least die dry and not out here. Don’t want to keep going. Last dream I had was nice. I’d like to see you again._

Disregarding the moisture remaining on the tablet, he pocketed it cautiously. More to look into at a later point.

Upstairs. There was someone upstairs- or, had been, prior to this individual’s infection. He could not evaluate much from their corpse, but, then again, they had been in the water for quite some time.

The storerooms lay above these docks; a _long_ way above. They’d a stag station- which, even assuming there were yet patrolling stags, he had no intention of using- and, more appealing for his situation, an elevator that could take one directly to the crossroads above.

A final look to the body.

A part of his mind he was already deeply resenting the return of wondered if marinating in rainwater and runoff _completely_ ruined the taste of the meat.

…That was something else he was going to have to attend to, though he fortunately had enough standards to move himself away from the water’s edge and set his mind to finding something else. The movement startled a nesting vengefly, that bravely marshaled forwards to defend its territory; with a swift pounce, he pinned it, live and squalling in anger, between two of his hands, where it could not set its pinchers into the gaps in his chitin.

He stared it down, with something less than a predator’s cold serenity.

…Not that many standards, really.

\--

With his brief and unsatisfying meal in his stomach, he set his attention to climbing. Fortuitously it seemed that not every elevator had met the same fate as the palace servants’, and, perhaps even better than the rotting floors of the royal quarter, these structures largely held onto their dignity, which made them easier to traverse. Even then, he was forced to break to gather the length of him onto a bench and catch his breath.

While he recuperated, he read more of the journal. The unfortunate bug was called Aymich. They had lived during what he gathered was a period of long deterioration; well beyond the kingdom’s glory days, but it seemed the panic of spreading madness had not suffocated them all in a single swoop.

(he wondered at that; that lower beings had surpassed their god in will. That he had crumbled, when they had not.)

Aymich had worked briefly as a scribe, to no particular success (and little wonder, to observe the state of their calligraphy; their personal writings were riddled with errors, both in formation and sentence structure) but believed their true passion was music. They had, as many within the city, been seized with young love for the songstress Marissa, though they had never spoken, and they had discovered her body by happenstance, something that troubled them constantly.

_I lay you among the roses, like you deserved, but they were going bad. I know you’d hate to hear it, but you were going bad, too. Not in the way of the madness. I couldn’t watch it happen to you. I ran away. Forgive me..!_

After that point, they grew occasionally disoriented. One entry had them fervently believing she was alive and traveling with them, only to resume the next in a shaking hand, affirming they were alone and had not stolen her corpse. Even then, they dreamed of her often enough that they eventually stopped detailing the incidents, and then no longer noted that all of their dreams had the same content.

The seeds of Aymich’s demise were obvious. They must have been rather perfect prey for Her. And, yet, from that, it complicated the matter of piecing the past together. How accurate could they be? They were overly sentimental, a young fool in love, twice-maddened by grief and Light by the time they had made their first marks on this stone. The most promising fragments of their story were those they spent the least on, while they prattled for line upon line about Marissa.

He debated disposing of the tablet, but instead, simply stowed it again, and climbed down from the bench. They had not noted much of their conversation with the ‘bug upstairs’, beyond that cryptic allusion, and this far in his climb, he had found no one.

Past an upended barrel. Past an infestation of belflies- their trajectory was obvious, their minds worn plainly, and if one did not panic they could be avoided in a simple manner. Past where the building ended and the cave opened to dry air, but yet more immobilized lifts, once again, spaced _just_ so that they were not impassible, merely an annoyance he didn’t need.

Perhaps it was in being in the exact state of mind when one yearns to think about anything besides the unseemly way he was stretching, leaping and scrabbling, but he took pause at a shell drum left just beyond the lifts.

It was empty.

Not an unheard of possibility, but unusual for the _way_ it was empty- the lid of it had been replaced at a specific angle, easily visible at a distance. He ventured further, emerged into the storerooms proper.

An entire pallet of barrels, their chains shattered, and then methodically sorted through. Half missing, but others remaining. Many of them had this same pattern, of caps askance, such that one could simply look around and note which ones had been checked. Those that had, were localized closer to the stag station- those that were not, populated the area closer to the lift.

A process more refined, and on larger scale, than mere scavenge.

Whoever-it-was had also arranged the pallet in such a way as to facilitate access up to the stagway platform, making it an easy climb, even for him in his current state.

What met his eyes was not the open platform, or a waiting stag, but instead where about half of the missing barrels had gone, lashed together to form a crude but resourceful barrier packed in with debris, stone, and earth. Venturing up to it, it was unmanned, but clearly designed to be guarded- a raised platform on the defended side. Places where weapons and ammunition could be stored at its guardians’ whim.

For the raw nature of its materials, the sensibility of it and the ordered mind it implied struck him like a leaden weight. Aymich the ill-fated fool did not think in this way, their mind clouded long before Her influence by whimsy.

This was civilized. Someone had secured the storeroom, advanced from the stagway, sorted through its contents, and raised defensible barrier to preclude husk or looter chasing them back up the tunnels. There was room for improvement, but it lay etched in the very design of the thing.

The city as Aymich described it was full of bodies- shambling husks, infected guards, those of mixed fortunes who lay still at rest in their deaths.

The city he had passed through was clean. Too clean. What had been left to rot… what had not.

Deliberation. Mind. Illumination.

Hers? Laughable. She would never stoop to using base materials, even if they were the only useful thing on hand. Nothing that was not Her light, incorruptible, devouring.

Then _whose_?

Time. Time enough for something else to see spark of inspiration in holy ground, place their hands to the earth and begin to shape it.

Beyond the barricade glinted the bronze of the stag bell. Someone had- not recently, but not very long ago, either- cleaned it.

Options. Reveal himself now- summon whatever creature now ruled these tunnels, stag or otherwise- and rapidly face what power saw fit to claim his ancient works for themselves.

Or…

He had faced gods and prevailed.

_Not like this._ _And not directly_. _And look where you are- what befell you at merely Her hands. Would you call that prevailing_?

Or…

Proceed to the temple. Take the lift, and leave this enigma for another time. A more advantageous point.

If that came.

If not…

He would think of something, he told himself, climbing down the barricade and retracing his steps towards the great lift instead. Not as reassurance, but simply in that this was the only thing he had left: thought.

\--

The lift cavern stretched to the western side of the storerooms, a broad, bulky elevator designed less for the arrival of foot traffic- for that, the pilgrim’s road- and more for delivery of goods directly from the crossroads. By design, it retreated to the top when out of use, but that was of no consequence, as it could be conveniently accessed by the…

Toll machine.

He stared down the instrument, nearly his exact height, sleek black metal undaunted by the city’s decay. Could recall his own precise awareness, in smug certainty- the common bug would lash fervor and indignation on such things at their worst moments, and they would, of course, be designed to accommodate.

Knowing full well the futility of it, he nonetheless tried the lever. The display bobbed fractionally, still reading the proper toll, and, the pinnacle of purity in one’s duty, did not budge.

The King himself, presently a very long way from purity, descended further to the very mortal gesture of rubbing the bridge between his eyes.

Very well then.

He retraced his steps.

It was impossible to consider that nowhere in the entirety of this storeroom, half-ransacked though it may have been, there was enough geo to pay a simple toll.

Several minutes later, he was coming to regret those sentiments.

The mind that had repurposed the stag station and harvested half was an efficient scavenger with the experience and manpower to gather in what he could only assume had been not that much time. He, for all of his expertise in other fields, some of them quite inscrutable to the common bug, could not claim exhaustive training in, well, looting a ruin. The scant handful of times the skill had come necessary in Hallownest’s construction, he’d been at luxury to delegate.

And, yet, to put it that way sounded just a little bit pathetic. When had he become someone averse to even the simple work of moving place to place and searching shell drums for their contents? It was basically just cataloguing with a secondary agenda.

There was a surprising amount of spider’s silk. Certainly more than had been hauled to the palace station for the construction and stress-testing of the seals of binding, and the protective shroud that had been placed onto Lurien. Spooled in its raw form, and also woven leaves of parchment, though of the crate he found, rainwater had breached it at some point, and the stack had rotten through.

(Vindictive pride regarded the mess coldly. Lazy scribes yearned for lighter books, pens rather than chisels- but truly nothing endured like stone.)

He replaced the lid and moved to set it aside before noting a gleaming edge- a heavy circular lock on an upright chest similar to those commonly used to store tax money or valuables. It had been dragged to one side, half-embedded in the wall. This, certainly, could contain what he sought.

And, yet, on approach, he lingered. The cognizance of it- that even in ruins, it was his burden to bear clarity, to know better- to retain civility against the savage and mindless, and what did it mean, precisely, to stoop to an act of petty theft-

He looked upwards, futilely as the gesture showed him nothing but cavern ceiling.

_…Requisitioning. Think of it as requisitioning, then._ The fate of all minds in the kingdom hinged on him being able to reach the temple and find out what had gone wrong before his affliction took him.

The weight on his mind changed hands, then, from restraint to certainty, and he set himself to the lock, casting about it with several sets of limbs at once. Simple, but efficient. From its structure, he could intuit the shape of the key, shape passable replica of woven light, and press it into service, making minute adjustments until the tumblers settled with a seemly _click_.

He swept the lid back, studying the glittering interior and making precise selection of two of the heavy golden tokens, and a few smaller units to make up the difference. There. His hand hesitated, considering.

It would be… sensible to take more, wouldn’t it? In case he faced other devices that needed it?

_…Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t tarry long. And there are no toll gates between the lift and the temple. Not any that you’ll need._

He closed the chest, and retraced to the lift. Fortunately, every part of the machine itself worked perfectly- the coins fit in with precise clunks, the lever turned briskly, and the podium retracted to its chamber, yielding a call lever, which depressed with a pleasant clack.

A thunderous shudder filled the room, but no further sounds. He paused, attention lifted expectantly to the sensibly sealed doors at the top of the chamber.

If he’d done all this only for some flaw in inaccessible mechanisms to have rendered the lift inaccessible…

…it was an implicit threat, but on further examination, he was not sure who he could possibly ply it upon. If that hypothetical was true, he would simply have to climb the majority of the fungal wastes, if that path was still traversable. If not, he would… possibly have to dig his own path.

A further rumble diverted him from having to consider anything worse, and the doors gave way to the descending lift, settled into its furrow and content. The breath by which he advanced through its doors and shifted his grip to its lever was distinctly _relieved_.


	4. Progress Upon Crawling Progress

The air of the crossroads was… odd. A fading warmth; a stale putridity. Proceeding along a thoroughfare of fossilized figures, he witnessed where dull brown stains marked the stone in patches. _She_ had been here- or at least, Her enmity had been here. Come and gone, and left behind defilement, but not remotely of Her usual level.

The thoroughfare opened into a cavern. With the hum of urgency, his foresight warned him of an ambush from above- he situated laterally, and aspid spit fouled a small white plant where his foot had been. The creature itself, hardly thwarted, buzzed out of reach and filled its gorge to attempt again.

Aspids truly knew not gods. If they did command some vestige of awareness too weak for him to seize, it seemed consumed entirely with disdain and a keen desire to soften anything that came before it by pelting it with venom.

Its tenacity would be nearly worthy of respect, if not for everything else about the creature.

He sprang to cover beneath an outcropping that forced it to reposition. A wrought-iron shape glinted at him- its tip split into three, two curled and edgeless, but between them, a sharpened point…

…Served at velocity, it would suffice.

He gripped the stem of it, willed sheer force of cold into the metal until it became brittle, then, when it could be plucked like a flower, shifted it to a more advantageous grip, rounded the corner on the advancing aspid and threw the weapon.

It had been admittedly some time since he had wielded such; the aspid was gored, but imprecisely. It writhed and spasmed as it fell to the ground, held by the weight of the weapon.

An imperfect strike. He advanced on the creature, twisted his makeshift spear once to finish it, and then withdrew the weapon to study its tip.

…Blunt, compared to a true weapon. And of poor metal. It was intended for ornamentation.

He lifted his eyes to the cavern, where, faintly, he could make out another aspid in the distance blundering along.

Mind made up, he slid the spear through the aperture that had once allowed for his wings, and then let it pierce outwards of his surface layer of robes. When released, it settled to his back.

He set himself to the climb.

\--

**CHAPTER IV: PROGRESS UPON CRAWLING PROGRESS**

\--

The going was difficult but not unmanageable. Certainly no worse than those he had made from the basin, although the exertions he had put himself through on this- closing on the second day of his return- were beginning to evenly distribute pain throughout his limbs. At times, he had to halt himself until the shaking settled, reassert control of his breath.

Local life troubled at points, but the spear did its work well enough. Though it put more of a strain on his tired body, he trusted that over the state of his soul, after the harsh lessons previously learned trying to clear the stains from the ancient basin.

Nonetheless, upon splitting the gullet of a gorged vengefly he stopped to peer at it, the hallmarks of Her touch that lingered. Collapsed boils- most of them external, but a few within the skull that had left the creature nearly blind and hunting only by scent. It had gone hungry since She relinquished her hold, and that had driven it to further frenzy.

She and Her works, if nothing else could be said for them, did not know fatigue.

He turned his gaze from the carcass to his own hand, finely-segmented fingers quaking despite his will.

It was a way, perhaps, that She had always been above him.

“…I truly must be losing my mind, if I envy a creature maddened with light.”

He left the vengefly where it lay and fought all desire to rest until he had put it out of his sight. After that, there was no good reason to stop. So long as he could settle himself into a rhythm of movement, he could- perhaps not forget his exhaustion, but maintain even pressure that gave it no quarter to spring upon. 

He climbed past the leaning timbers that marked the entrance to the crystal mines, hesitated dangerously just long enough to calculate a path over the uncertain heights.

At last, at last, he stood on level ground with his objective, and could merely walk. Dust melded with ichor, clung to his still damp robes along with the mixed and sullied lifebloods of several creatures who’d perished unfortunately close to him.

_Conserving energy_ , he reminded himself, and tried to ignore the sensation. He had done well up to this point, and merely had to push the thought down a second time to continue.

The caverns nearest the temple had been scored and carved heavily by infection, yet the interloper itself lay as only a handful of desiccated remnants at the bottom of its trenches. He plucked a withered stem, elected to risk a spark of light through its length, and may as well have flung his light onto a stone in the hopes of raising a construct for the effect it had. There was not even the hollow semblance of life left in this thing.

She had made great inroads into this place. But all of them thwarted. Crushed, absolutely.

By what?

The brittle thing held neither answer nor resistance as he crushed it in his hand, and he left its ashes behind as he proceeded into the dark.

The temple itself had been carved from the shell of an ancient creature which had lived and died long before its arrival. Laid upon its belly, light yet poured from its gaping windows, disturbing the deep gloom of the cavern only partially. He feared not of darkness, but even he nearly hesitated at this most urgent of moments-

-the shadows over Hallownest had grown in his absence. He was certain of this.

He moved to the doorway, and beheld with his own eyes what he had witnessed in passing through vision of the void. 

The egg was gone. Specter nor shadow of the Vault remained, merely the vast and shallow recess in the earth that had once contained it.

The timeline of events complexified. Breached from within or without? From the Dreamers’ seal, or a heretofore unseen method that could strike through the shell itself? Was the surge of infection because She had freed Herself, raged outwards, and then faded, or that something had desecrated the temple and breached the Vault in pursuit of Her?

Thorough investigation. There had to be something. Marks of plague around the entrance- if something had scraped inwards from outside, or outward from within. Searing air had exhaled from the vast corpse, left its niches and grooves in ancient shell-

“ _Who’s there? Friend or foe?_ ”

A voice raised over the silence, called across distance. Simple inquiry- but in the moment he spun to face the source-

A barricade, piled stone and rubble, fragments purloined from his works, and beyond it, nearly imperceptible in the gloom, mistakable for a stone outcropping except that it had lifted its head, had called-

Alive.

Ancient fear drowned sense and reason. 

He fled.

\--

When he came to a halt, having made on near-instinct the beginning of the winding way back down his initial path, it was involuntary. Agitation had set very poorly in his body- he folded over into a fit of coughing that wracked his body.

Eventually the void inside settled once more, and his vision cleared to realize some amount of it had been scattered onto the stones, a perfect black smear that showed his own reflection, filthy and woebegone as he was with his cracked face. 

He pressed his hand to the edge of the puddle focused to destroy it-

-his vision swam warningly, and he retracted the light, left the stain where it was, and elected instead to simply keep going.

It seemed he was reaching the end of his ability to remain focused and in composure of himself. Prudent, then, to avoid anyone whose intentions remained undisclosed.

(He stifled the notion that it was cowardly, _beneath a king_ , to flee a stranger with a barricade)

Downward proved easier than any other direction. At least, up to a point- gripped by fatigue, he hesitated fractionally on a precipice that would take him lower.

…His objective, for now, was to find somewhere to…

(hide?)

(what a wretched concept.)

… secure himself until this bout of weakness passed. This particular plunge wandered faintly in his gaze- he turned away from it, put distance between himself and the edge and instead chased a lengthwise thoroughfare. Withered bodies littered the path, a few clutching nails and shells. At least one was heavily distorted by plague run its course and now stained thickly with void.

He wondered.

He didn’t have time for this. He redoubled his pace. When another drop came, he did not hesitate, but boldly for an unaerodynamic creature simply leaped into the space and plunged, grasping with his forelegs where ground proved fortuitous, killing his momentum just for a moment before pivoting and diving again, and once more to reach-

The last impact struck him with the tinkling creak of breaking shell. It was not foresight nor artifice but sheer _luck_ that saw him land just shy of two more metal spikes like his purloined spear, but the stone that halted him was not much kinder. He made use of his arms to pull himself up, and took in the silence.

…A village had stood here once. The shell of it remained, much as the shells of its inhabitants were faintly visible. Ahead what stood among them was…a chapel. Rudimentary place of worship for simple people dwelling far beyond the city. Through a gap in the open doors, the light of a dim and cracked lantern cast itself over the spires of his own symbol: tall, proud, and very nearly alien to him in this moment.

The god to which this place had been dedicated crawled into its interior, hesitated long enough to gather the lantern and simply came to halt on the stones before the altar.

They resided there, two faint lights in the dark.

\--

An uncertain amount of time passed.

In gradual motions vigor returned to him, and he could appraise his surroundings.

It was… dusty. Once this small lamp had been matched by a fellow in the right-hand corner, but some impact or trouble in the place had struck both from their moors, and only this one, with its slightly battered lumafly, had survived.

It was sufficient to say no one had paid any sort of respect in this place for a long time, so he hardly needed concern himself with the notion that he had desecrated it. He went to set the lantern on the altar, paused, and then, laying a hand flat on the surface instead, swept the meagre chamber in light.

It cleared the basics of windblown dirt from the place at least. This done, he replaced the lumafly.

Even clean, it was a gloomy and forsaken place. Never built to accommodate very many bugs, and hardly intended to reflect the splendor of his light. Even being personally present, the vaulted corners kept their deep shadows against him. 

If not for the total absence of useful tools and materials, this could very nearly be his workplace at the palace.

…Which was to say it had very little merit, but it was a start.

He emptied himself of what he had gathered- hapless Aymich’s journal, and the papers from the ancient basin- now waterlogged from his journey through the city- set aside to one corner, the latter tucked slightly under the aforementioned to steady them against draft. From there, he propped the door open with a loose paver taken from the floor.

His initial estimation- that this village was completely forsaken- seemed not entirely correct. A single illuminated house loomed across the distance, cloying smoke drifting from its open door along with the warm chortles of some very contented soul- contented, he suspected, in a way that had much to do with the smoke.

They might prove trouble. On another hand he would likely see more indication of their comings and goings if they did very much of that- and with that in mind, he bracketed the idea for later and set his attention to the village.

Bodies first. There were a very small number of them. It seemed that either predators had cleaned the area, or that its inhabitants had forsaken this place to die elsewhere. Those that were there could be easily gathered, relocated to the rear door of the chapel for future examination, and more importantly the exertion served a test to see how much his… _stop_ had recuperated him.

His abdomen ached faintly, but it was one of few things that did. Perhaps he was adjusting to the tasks at hand.

Next he studied the interior of the houses. Most seemed forsaken- one was firmly sealed, its interior all dark, and its door refused his efforts. The others lay open, almost cavernously so- a few had closed doors but could easily be accessed from their sunken rooves. One proved particularly useful- a simple office that had once belonged to a local official. With it, there were a collection of archives denoting, among other things, population censuses and notes when someone became ill. It took several trips to gather the journals, but once they were there, he could do little more than pile them- there were seldom more than one or two of a type, and he would have time to sort through the text and attempt a more proper categorization later.

This had not taken much time. Restlessness brewed in the wake of his previous inactivity like so many hatchling gruzzers under the shell. Some enterprising soul in search of a shortcut had hacked out the supports beneath a section of path, cleared stone and timber roughly to one side. He ascended through that opening now and traced his own footsteps, noting with faint distaste where he had bled through them.

That he was steady now, he could say for certain- his wash of cleaning the altar had also liberated at least the exterior of him from the clinging stain.

If it were so easy to extract the underpinning cause, he would never have taken to seclusion as he had.

He could- really should- eliminate those stains. And yet it seemed risible to think much would come of them that would not be made worse by the effort in purifying each in turn. Somehow these two elements of great caustic nature- his own ancient blood, colder and brighter than the surface of his shell and seldom spilled over the centuries of his reign; and the ineffable odorless void, without temperature or texture- the mixture of them was stable, sludgy and lightless. He’d pity the foolish creature that might try it for sustenance, granted, but in absence of habitual sanguivores in the region he doubted the crossroads had many who’d dare.

Speaking of the void…

Surmounting the walkway, he contemplated the void-stained corpse. A simple plan in theory- relocate it as he had the others- quickly proved a laborious inception. The careless nature of Her designs on life meant that it was really only the plague bubbles that had held this exceptionally unfortunate creature together- the shell had been pried apart up the back and shoulders and with very little jostling he suspected the head would remove entirely from the rest of the body. Its abdomen, rotted through, was light enough to carry, but handling a delicate specimen, he could only make slower progress, and that meant he would have to- unfortunately- heed the aspids that he had simply been able to evade by moving at speed.

A second drop to the left had fewer aspids, but a longer walk altogether… So be it.

\--

On return, shifting the lumafly to a slightly higher position cast even light over the altar, which was more than large enough to hold the body. He arranged it prone and began from the opened back, making a suture that extended the wound the last few critical segments downward, and a second precise application of light to cut through the back of the head and the fused-beyond-salvage mask all at once.

One thing could be certain from cursory examination of the brain- this bug had not perished before the plague reached them. What little remained spoke to youth and athleticism. A commoner, but not beset by any other affliction, not shell-rot or joint deterioration- their hands in particular were in good condition and each finger articulated smoothly. To crack and partition the shell showed tissues discolored by plague, but still of supple texture and consistency.

In throes of infection they likely had experienced no discomfort, nor so much as inconvenience from the fracturing of the spine and the progressive decay of their organs, merely chased about their deteriorating routines without sense anything was different.

Until something had ended this existence for them. What had caught his eye before remained: there was a great deal of void in the body. Marks of void-burn brushed the edges about their broken back, where the abyss at tide had poured its way into them. Compared to the searing heat of plague, these burns were distinctive- void, of course, was never hot or cold, could not be frozen or heated to a gas. To be agitated by soul to strike as it did here, it could more accurately be said that anything caught by fuming, concentrated void was simply ground by the inexorable cogwheels of time accelerated to fever pace.

They had been corroded to death by a single strike of what he wagered but lacked the resources to confirm was some of the purest void he had ever borne the privilege of beholding.

_Focused_ void. During the pure vessel’s education, they had demonstrated some limited ability to do so- seizing, harnessing, and wielding the very matter that forged their flesh. A retaliatory measure that relied on preexisting injury- useful in emergency, but not one he had seen much investment in training. And even then, his creation had not harnessed it in a way that would produce such results.

That current in the void that had awakened him… the vision in the Abyss, elements of which had proven true. What had become of the Black Egg, and what had become of Her. And now, this corpse, suggesting something had hunted a construction of Hers with purified void as its weapon of choice.

There was a way to reach the source of such things. With careful fingers, he found where the husk’s heart had been and closed his shining grip upon it.

Bloated once with the pestilence of the old light.

Filled now with void.

Touched by spark of enlightenment. To his sensibilities, he felt his power plunge deep into formless waters, as surely as if he stood on the edge of the abyss’s shore.

“ ** _You have devoured the sun at height._** ”

“ ** _You are the Void Given Focus._** ”

“ ** _Show yourself._** ”

His spark drifted into quiescence, and he considered that he had made a mistake. What lay in the abyss to be called by name? Only one creature had ever emerged worthy of title. And they had failed- what lay below…

He moved to release his grip, and found that something was holding onto his hand.

In an instant, the king’s brand burned as if pressed against its opposite.

A howl split the room and all went dark.


	5. Fleeing Thoughts, Chasing Dreams

_O God of Gods! Doth thou forsake us?_

_Punish us, if we have failed thee, rain lash and nail, sunder us as thou hath sundered thy pretender- but turn not thy fearful gaze away! We beseech… We offer…_

\--

He thrashed to wakefulness like a lesser creature, poured light wastefully into the space until the residue caked to the lantern flaked off and he realized that it was a mortal sort of darkness that surrounded him, the same gloom of caverns that was- was _becoming_ \- ordinary to him.

Though it was a lesser light to him, he could not resist gathering the lantern up to ascertain the state of the room, allowing its glow to bolster his own.

The body was gone. Consumed to leave residue, or melted- crumbled to pool an even black stain over the altar. The single space that remained clean was the alcove where he returned the lumafly with careful fingers.

Beyond, the single lit house’s occupant chortled onwards. A faint and lonely wind drifted over the cavern, breathed from the shores of a large body of water somewhere beyond.

Restlessness of a new kind crawled in the former king’s veins, and he proceeded down the thoroughfare out of the village, leaving tracks of black blood behind.

\--

**CHAPTER V: FLEEING THOUGHTS, CHASING DREAMS**

\--

It was halfway in chasing this windswept western reach that he could catch up to his own stride and the rationale of what he was doing. (For there must be, something, always- one could not move thoughtlessly as a beast did.)

The temple was guarded. Whatever force stirred in the entrails of his former kingdom had acted upon it, and was hostile to direct confrontation in a way he could not conquer. But the Vault had from its inception been a configuration of many facets united at the point of the kingdom’s brow. If one point was inaccessible, information could still be gathered at any of the other points. Having witnessed the temple- if he permitted to call his actions such- he could now proceed to the respites of the dreamers, and this carried him past the descent back into the city, instead chasing a shorter path down into the fungal wastes in pursuit of the Teacher.

Monomon’s estate occupied what had once been an otherwise unpromising and dank furrow in the earth carved by an ancient waterfall of acid and left in dense, astringent humidity. For her service and insights he would have afforded her more proper accommodations close to city, but she and her ephemeral kindred had found this place to their liking. (As little as he had ever understood the minds of those others) Dwelling there, between the acid-blighting of Greenpath and the wastelands, the Teacher had worked curious arts to refine the area to the needs of her people.

He was reminded, as a draft of mold struck him from the mouth of the wastes, spores immediately washing his forsaken raiment a shade of yellow from the moment he set foot on their fragile caps, that there was a reason he personally had dwelt in a recess of Hallownest bereft of any life not actively carried by the palace gardeners. His lady had always possessed a great patience for the wild state of things. It was a place they disagreed- as he was reminded, dispatching a fungoon with a spear-strike before it could douse him in noxious gasses a second time.

Acid pools bubbled and hissed, promising a very unfortunate drop indeed. The fairer features of the pilgrim’s road had succumbed entirely- the walls had steepened or been cut through by caustic waterfalls. He had recalled feeling great certainty at taming the wastes- making dominion of them- driving back the onslaught of the mantises before, ultimately, Dryya had secured their assistance in keeping the kingdom’s less agreeable neighbor in check.

Now, as elsewhere, so much of that work had withered away that it might as well have never been initiated. But it came with some small advantages. He halted in his descent to contemplate a narrow gully cut by the acid that filled it, pruning what had once been a solid wall into a kind of overhang.

Without breath or preamble, he forged into the water and out the other side, his horns scraping the belly of the overhang until he mounted back into air once more. He had lost a good inch of the hemline of his robes, something he noted treasonously made it easier to move in their tangled state. However, any amount of cleaning they had done was promptly thwarted as a new wave of spores simply clung to the wetted fabric. He made a passing, faintly despairing attempt to brush himself off, before surrendering it as a lost cause, at least while he was here.

If nothing else could be gained for the silence that had befallen Hallownest’s shell, it meant he did not need to be seen.

( _Friend or foe_?)

He settled his robes with slightly more force than necessary and set his attention to the space he had entered. A chasm, washed in the dilute illumination of a dream-root; several branching and rubbery mushrooms reigning sovereign over their innumerate, diminutive kin. Through their boughs, he could see a place above where the golden haze of the caverns washed to pink- to the foreign domain that had been long ago carved by Monomon’s dreams.

A solitary fungoon attended the area, its trunk wagging placidly in the air as it, myopically, had not yet spotted him. It would almost certainly be trouble if he attempted to ascend without dealing with it. He drew his spear, aimed, and flung.

Almost as soon as it was in his hand, he realized something was wrong, a hypothesis confirmed when its trajectory bent awry, missing the fungoon, striking a nearby mushroom instead, and shattering on impact, its acid-rotted pieces scattering sideways. A blunt length hit the fungoon in the side of its rotund and boneless body and left it to drift lengthwise, barely having the cognizance to register it had been hurt.

He recalled times in the darkness of his workshop crafting weapons and armor, works of pale steel refined in secrets of artifice known to no other creature that drew breath in these lands- shining, immaculate things that had defied the ravages of time and beast, had lodged, even, amidst the segments of the Blackwyrm Itself and wrenched free without so much as a chip in their blade. He had carried such a weapon once himself- a four-pointed spear, gleaming and cold, that could have cut down anything in its path, one that had retired quietly to a position of honor, when such barbarism was no longer demanded of Hallownest’s ruler, and the kingdom’s boundaries had settled to peace.

The recollection all struck him like a small landslide, tumbled down to rest at the inevitable conclusion that he had flung a half-melted fencepost of pitiful iron at one of the dullest creatures of the kingdom- a beast that knew not even the civilizing weight of a shell- and had not even managed to strike his target directly.

He had a headache. He could not be sure if it was related to the above, or simply an early warning that he was straining his meagre budget of energy and resolve.

He put his back to the offending creature, faced the wall and began to climb.

\--

For all of how short of a walk it ultimately proved, the transition to Fog Canyon was almost immediate. Here, air stilled as if one wandered through the vein of a great tree. Clear bubbles captured all things, held them for study as surely as glass.

Creatures could only be shaped by duty, purpose, and mind, but in such an environment one could see how the Teacher had perennially retained her good humor and inquisitive nature. As little as she had ever deigned to explain of her distant homeland, the Canyon, she had said, was much its likeness but weaker; and in such a place, all things became immortalized, preserved. Even when corpses should rot quickly in the cloying humidity, they oft instead lingered nearly untouched, only to violently desiccate on removal. A sense of weightlessness pervaded the place- floating islets of rock intermingled with the drifting Ooma themselves.

They had been intelligent, though he had not communicated with them- the smaller ones more or less simple minds. He could see at a glance there were yet orange stains in a particular passing specimen’s nucleus- orange and black, sunspotted, but unmistakable.

And yet at the same time, Her anger knew temporary denial- whatever She would think of him, had always thought of him, had crooned, hissed, screeched, poured in torrent from the voices of Her prisoners- the Ooma simply continued upward, without eye nor head to suggest that it had perceived him or paid him any mind at all. He could ignore it- stand unharmed beside it to look down. 

Weightless, it might have been, but weightless he was certainly not. If he still had his wings…

_They were tainted_ , he reminded himself. _Would you have shown the world such a sight_?

Of course not. He had come this far without them. He only need continue further- it was mostly downhill anyway-

It nearly didn’t feel humiliating anymore to throw himself across the gap to a small island. He even felt a flicker of pride as his front several sets of legs connected surely.

That light guttered when the rest of him landed _off_ the small platform, tail curling and rear legs scratching furiously at platform’s underside, ineffectually, showering dirt and stone down below- down to points of orange light that-

_No, you great idiot_ -

-hurtled towards him with a hiss.

\--

He roused sprawled unevenly between his stomach and left side, and the entire right half of his body screamed with fire and enmity. His first attempt at rising brooked agonizing rebuke. He brought a hand to his face, fingers finding the crack that halved it, and for a terrified moment he considered the possibility that the blast and what could only have been the ensuing fall had disfigured him further.

Possessing nothing reflective, he searched with his hand- no. All was- both fortunately and unfortunately- as he had left it. It did, however, _hurt_ , with the irritation of flesh that knew not its shell and cried out for protection.

As the fear escaped him, it ebbed with it any amount of energy he may yet have had. It was really quite a grand ambition wasn’t it? To make such an affair of visiting Monomon’s Archives. She would be dead. If not by plague or void, or any amount of the battle between them, then simply lying preserved, breathing but lifeless, bound to her task as she had always been and would remain.

Dead creatures had no need of kings. Enlightenment and civilization did them no good.

Ha. As if he had done very much of bringing either of those things. He had come to see exactly how well his works held up, after all.

Perhaps he had only entertained the notion of being needed selfishly.

He lowered to the earthen floor, smeared with mud and the oozing remnants of trampled mushrooms, exhausted eyes drifted ahead to alight on…

…the dream-root he had previously passed without afterthought. Pulled forwards a half-inch, he stretched a limb out to touch it.

Faintly warm. Beyond the lives of those who once thrived here, it yet held its host of dreams.

Roots…

…He wondered if hers brushed against this. She did not really have favorite plants. It seemed anything that could feed off of her light meant more or less the same to her; and yet, she cared for them. This one here, in this wayward acid-washed gully, the domain between two of the kingdoms’ outer reaches…

He moved a bit closer. Perhaps, if he could simply…

An arm around the stem. It was easier to move.

He curled about it, and waited for an end.

\--

She sang in the emerald citadels of her garden, the glow of her diffused into dappled lights through the broad leaves. The movement of the notes, languid as the flowing of a stream, unhurried by breath or expectations of time. She had been singing when they had met, across the march of centuries and uncertain times before them. She seemed at such moments unlike him, not a creature who had an imperfect beginning, but one who had perhaps been beautiful her entire existence, shining spore to shining root and now, the boughs of her spread overhead.

He lay at what could be considered the foot of her, where she threaded down into the earth, his shining body spread next to hers, and in the light the two of them shared he idled schematics for buildings that did not exist- concert halls, and instruments, of what could produce a sound worthy of hers, of what venue could contain it. They did not understand her, the populace that grew in that united light- they did not hold the shape of her, or cast their thoughts into it. It was their weakness, and disadvantage. Something had to be done. She could not echo alone in only hidden places. She was meant for more than that. Inferior sounds carried effortlessly, commanded undivided attention.

“Dear, are you listening?”

He bowed his head in apology, made composure of himself. And, yet, she did not return to the song, when he had counseled his attention.

“There have always been bug and beast in these lands. I thought little of them, to be truthful. As diversion, the impermanence can leave one wanting. It troubles even them. So little of time they command that they live in fear of being torn from one another’s grip, as if it is not inevitable. As if they will not be carried on, away from their loves. As if time has not always been this way; as if it will not always. Ends come to everything, for mortal creatures. They are not like us.”

There was something wrong. She had not spoken this way before. He looked towards her, her high distant face, but her head was turned away from him-

“Perhaps, so I once thought. And yet, I believe I begin to understand what they felt.”

Why was she staring upwards this way?

“Will I wait, dear wyrm, until the lack of you pains me no longer?”


	6. The Moving Earth

The veneer of dream-spore on his mind did not burst like a bubble, but it did fade from light that seemed genuine to faint gloom as if beheld through wing-scales. With empty eyes, he studied the world, his position, and then made immediately to banish the sight behind his eyelids.

In the darkness thus conferred over all, far above, a fungoon perished with the most ignoble of noises.

He did not so much as flinch. To mount the energy again, to remove himself from this situation, from whatever creature was hustle-huff-scratching its way down- was to climb a mountain for no certain purpose.

If he stayed here, petty thought though it was, he might dream of his lady again. It was hardly as if She would catch him hurled adrift in that state, not with Her eyes carved out, not with whatever had condemned Her to only this lowliest of scraping existences so close to Her ascension-

In defiance of everything he may have hoped, or wanted, a metal tool plied at his shoulders, its points sharp enough for discomfort but not angled as to puncture the marginally yielding flesh between his plates.

_What was left of him to demand- what did they want from him_ - _if all was ashes-_

The prodding repeated, without shift in urgency or hostility.

He lay as a dead thing did, as he, by all rights, to anyone and all, should have been.

A sudden shift in pattern- a ghost of a sensation brushing a rear leg still stinging from Ooma fire. He drew it back from the coldness, and only then realized that this, of all petty things, had given him away.

“Don't embarrass both of us,” came a voice from above, a shock of dry certainty in a labyrinth of dust, humidity, and moisture. “Playing dead won't fool anyone.”

\--

**CHAPTER VI: THE MOVING EARTH**

\--

As a demand any base creature could answer, it came as unto second nature. He rose, in single motion smoothly settling his robes with precise movements of lower hands, as to not disturb the height of his shoulders.

The interloper was a beetle of all things, though for creatures of her kind a fairly impressive one in both size and features. Unfamiliar pale dappling spread across the broad shoulders of an iron-gray carapace, broad and shallow antennae that reached outward like horns. Fair-faced, or else equipped with pale mask that her small eyes gazed through with the very sort of imperturbable neutrality that had crawled in her tones.

If there was small vindication to be had, both her stomach and the farming tool she carried in her hands-

(old steel. Sturdy, but worn. Of a place that seldom replaced a tool it could not repair, the core of it stalwart, but here a tine had been broken and affixed back to the haft of the weapon, and each branch of the thing bore scars of a thousand seasons’ worth of work.)

-were saturated at different points with the cloying sap of Greenpath plants, and the vital fluids of fungi that had met their end in her path to face him.

At the brow of her low-set head, she would have stood about as tall as Ogrim. And- another small victory- either she had been leaning quite far forwards to reach him, or had moved back as soon as he rose.

“Does this please you?” he asked her, in a tone that few creatures in Hallownest would place for a second as _amused_.

(It was mostly, in honesty, tired. But it was unbecoming of a monarch to show such things, and he would permit a lesser evil- hauteur- over a greater one- fatigue.)

“No,” she said, as blithely as someone who neither registered nor had ever borne mind to courtly shame.

Silence reigned. He did not permit the slightest adjustment of his face.

To the benefit of whichever of them had any sort of schedule to keep, she folded first. “That isn’t very important. But you can stand, so that’s something. If you fell as far as you must have…”

“I was not injured,” he cut her off. “My descent was assisted significantly.”

And it had been, by simple deductive reasoning. It was unlikely that he had plunged senseless through this mushroom grove and not struck anything to halt his progress. And if he had? This stranger, who appeared not to care or realize she addressed a king, even the fallowed remnants of such, did not need to know the limits of him.

And then, something unusual.

She lofted her head from him, studied the circle of boughs overhead, and something in the articulation of her jaws betrayed the distinct impression she found the situation funny. “That's good news to hear about someone lying in a heap at the bottom of a cliff.”

Lying in a _heap_?

He took a moment to freeze a nerve rising in irritation. “And who is it that seeks out such news, in lands turned hostile?”

A silence, as if she might not have heard, but, to small consolation, it did not seem as if she was ignoring him for amusement’s sake. Rather, insofar as he could understand the trifling of any mortal’s heart on a good day, she seemed perturbed. He contemplated a sound or command to recapture her attention, but ultimately, with fractional shudder of her heavy-plated carapace she refocused.

Taking advantage of that moment: “Who are you?”

“I’m Vigna.” Then, as if coming further out of whatever peculiar mood had captured her, “I called out to you at the temple, I don’t know if you remember.”

He felt himself stiffen, and halted the motion before it created a perceptible ridge in the plates below his robes.

And he had left such an efficient path to be followed, hadn’t he. The hopeful young architect- the idiot whose works loomed all around him as if to bury him- would have been proud. He might as well have located a menderbug office and placed royal commission for signposts.

He studied her again, gathered no more than he had observed before, except that she was a young creature, this earth-mover- younger than the height and solidity of her implied at glance. To attack in his unreliable state… he could not guarantee would end in his favor. Flee again, and she had proven the ability to track him. But moreover, he resented to provide an emissary of that force with opportunity to subjugate if she did not seek it preemptively.

Carefully instead, he selected words, ever his steadfast soldier. “I am not a foe.”

She, it seemed, was not always so inclined to. “What?”

“‘Friend or Foe,’ was what you said.”

“Oh! I see.” A blink. A moment of childish realization, and then, a mutter he caught easily across the settling, rustling quiet of the wastes, “You know, I don't know why anyone would answer ‘foe.’ If they were one wouldn't it serve them to say ‘friend?’ I should retire that question...”

The rising nerves settled with something like incredulousness, and a headache kindred to the one that had followed the senseless destruction of his makeshift spear. If the awareness that one could very well ramble at inane topics in the presence of a god and still prove dangerous did not hold him at his vigil, he might have again rubbed the bridge between his eyes.

Instead, he was reminded that if it were so taxing to hold a singular conversation without losing focus or decorum, he really was not in a position to have this conversation. In case it had been spoken aloud to submit to his judgment, he offered acknowledgement: “Possibly. But I have no time to consider trivialities. I must take my leave. Good-bye.”

She moved quickly in response, but not as he might have estimated. “Ah! Please let me go along with you. I can see that if the fall did not get you, the Ooma were much less kind.” With a clawed hand she indicated… well. The whole length of him, really.

…He could not wholly identify it as a gesture of spite. The whole length of him was, unfortunately, topically relevant.

“And we must be going in the same direction,” she offered ever-helpfully.

Could one refuse such a kindly request for a mere stranger- as she had given no indication she saw him any otherwise? He bristled further than he had before, and, worse, could no longer be certain if it was directed at her words or his own damned situation that put him in such a position. At his height, no one would have foisted companionship on him out of fear of his wellbeing. Who presumed they had anything to give to an irreproachable creature- a true light?

He placed his back to her, and set his posture a fraction of an angle straighter. “If that is the case, I will not impede you.”

He had proceeded to the wall, and regarded the acid gully- when Vigna spoke again. “Rest while I clear the way, so I can pass.”

A rightful identification that she could not wedge through that furrow. And it would… serve, to permit her make a smoother path of it.

It would serve, but a pettier thread of his mind had grip of his upper hand, and with a motion he bid her halt.

He had already promised there would be no impediment. It would be simply beneath him to discard that vow so easily.

And however Hallownest tarnished, rotted, crumbled… the Wyrm’s duty remained.

Minds expanded.

The beacon alight.

From the core of that beacon now, he drew a pure, cold thread, and soul wicked along, streamed from the mushrooms. The constitution of the wastes was sickly, alive with rot, and yet, life was life- and all felt his call.

With deft fingers, he pruned the bubble of soul at familiar volume, released and exhaled. Patterns of spell, of ancient mind and clearest certainty, spoke themselves: a single bright word, and once voiced, the obstruction had ceased fully. The path had been opened, and opened properly, a floor of partial glass that he dipped into, emerging upon the other side.

\--

To set himself to the climb that posed on the other side was a less enjoyable task, and one in which his self-appointed guard, with her sturdy claws, made swift work. For himself, he was not a poor climber (as ill as it boded that he had come to depend on such a skill), but of his legs, far more of the assemblage than he had presumed were injured, and reproached the touch of weight.

He did not falter in will, and he elected to disregard the pitying hand extended in his direction as he neared the final approach. Although ‘final’, of course, was a charming simplification of the matter. His destination of the faded chapel yet lay across the belly of the Crossroads.

(and that this Vigna had tracked him from that location, given when he had bled… his wound was becoming a problem.)

At the peak of his climb, he paused to contemplate a descent. Just as it had been on the trip outwards, sensible bridgework had given way to two jutting jaws of stone that met each other at a crooked angle, a space slipped between. From low to high, he had been unable to leap its berth, and had climbed the underbelly of it instead. From high to low, the edge was- only _possibly_ \- navigable by leap.

As if to punctuate his thoughts, Vigna chose that precise moment to set herself to the task, at a running jog that faintly rustled him before she sailed winglessly and caught her footing with weapon and claw.

His awareness of the situation slightly keener, he mentally turned over both of his options as if they were two cogwheels on a worktable. Both glinted back at him as wholly repulsive options in his present state.

One, he supposed, at length, could be discarded for the minute blemish that if he attempted to leap, and failed, it was quite likely Vigna would put hand on him to catch him, considering her willingness earlier.

Climb it was.

And climb he did.

The injured clusters of legs had begun to clamor in individualized grievances. He put on speed, modestly; it would hold until the temple. So long as Vigna kept up, that would not require the time for his headache to stir itself into anything more halting. An aspid made paltry attack at him, possessed with a peculiar form of bravery, but it was only a lesser beast, and its strikes could not touch him.

A creature that lived half-blinded by time, that knew nothing of future, of certainty. Even in ruin, he commanded such things…

… one of his feet slid at the mouth of a chasm, clumsy from injury. His headache steepened, folding under the dual burdens of tiredness and anger-

-the ground under his feet shook. He stood on a goam nest, as he knew, as he had observed, but in moments of fragmented time-

-arrhythmia, a lack of concert with what he’d seen-

-weightlessness, being thrown back, hauled back- reproach on two points-

The goam’s blunt crown of teeth snapping closed from its burrow, a single scrap of dull fabric its prize-

Beetle’s claws seized his robes by the scruff-

-the world out of concert and a thousand fragments of visions stumbling away from him as he had to wonder if he had actually _seen_ any of them. Instead, darkness bloomed in his vision, in the spaces time collected.

It had bitten _him_. Scored his flesh, a dry scrape of stone-cutting teeth on metal plates, impugned, assaulted, defiled _touched_ \- laid jaw upon flesh-

“I was mistaken,” he spoke into the dark and the words might all well have been stones.

“It’s not your fault,” words swam from overhead, from a faceless creature, kindly, sincerely, falsely.

“No.” Such a matter could not- ink and the weight of his hands blotted his eyes. “Why did I fail to see…”

_Fail. To. See._

“I can’t see…”

He lurched upright, threw himself into motion, and when his legs failed him, he shoved them aside as unreliable, could not be certain if it was on coils or limbs he moved but only that he moved at all, that he needed to move, away from this place. With his legs and in his mind he knew the place around them, knew where the creature was, the creature to depart from- some feverish fragment of him mumbled excuses in broken tongues-

His body halted, and he fell.


	7. Fair Concession Made

He fell down and the dark was waiting for him. It was waiting beyond his blinded gaze and he felt its grip on his hide no matter how he flinched at its touch and yet it did not press, did not hold or tighten, did not gather fistfuls of his robes or pull his horns.

He fell further and it was all around him and it was inside his eyes and eyelids and it did not attack and it did not have to.

He fell and saw nothing and did not know what shape he had, what shape he needed, a way in which someone could move, if there were eyes in the dark or somewhere above it.

He did not know.

And in this way, void had destroyed him, so perfectly it needed not do anything else.

He breathed and breathed in the dark, and it poured into his body and once there, it did nothing. It rustled faintly with his exhale, poured out of his body and replaced with a new draught.

He- he had been willing, before, to embrace the end of things.

_Not here. Not like this_.

Were they really his thoughts? Was it not his fate to face the darkness alone? Did something inside of him whimper now, begging for a spark to hold him?

Was this all that was left of him?

…And yet, a spark was there.

It was there, and he saw it, saw it clearly, in the dark, a tiny mote without mind, bright and uncomfortably warm, but that… did mean it was real.

He closed a hand over it that he was mostly sure he had, and it was an opening, and through the gap poured-

Not void.

Water?

Hot, scalding, and it poured into him, filled him, the silhouette of him- so quickly it was difficult to grab, difficult to focus, nearly hurt to do so but he had to- and-

\--

**CHAPTER VII: FAIR CONCESSION MADE**

\--

He broke surface and did nothing but breathe until he processed that his shoulders had struck smooth stone, and at such an angle that the wingless hollow in his back was irritated by it. A dripping trail told him that he had thrown himself quite a ways back from the surface of a pool of steaming white water.

A hot spring. He had barely considered the notion that he had not lost consciousness _in_ a hot spring when a shuffle of movement on his periphery reminded him that he had hardly lost consciousness _alone_.

And certainly enough, there was Vigna. He took a moment to study her posture- half-sprawled, half-bent over something that he realized a moment later was a basin of some kind of thickened substance, simmering away from heat. Food of a kind? She’d settled for a meal while waiting for him to rouse, it seemed, and when said rousing had proven… lively, it had taken her by surprise.

It was also enough of a reminder to the least-useful quadrant of his mind to opine that _he_ had not eaten since the mere vengefly in the city, and it was _quite_ interested in repeating its work.

At that point, he had seen enough, and redirected his attention, straightening his robes- that he supposed were no longer beige, though they were sopping wet.

So, some small element of the situation was not an utter waste.

He could think of several questions to ask, some of them useless, some of them foolish, and others simply far too telling of what he knew and did not know of the situation.

Neutrally, “how much time has passed?”

At the corner of his eye, he could see Vigna compose herself. “Some time,” came the answer, at first. Then, as if prodding herself for more details, “enough time to simmer down water and beans to gruel.”

Subjecting himself to a truly mortal habit, he blinked. 

For a moment, he did not do further. 

The boiling point of water- no. They were in a cavern of boiling water. He had to round by the relatively sensible remaining figure that Vigna was not exceptionally distressed and if one lost consciousness at great length that would generally warrant more of a response.

(Then again, she was an odd sort)

As if in concession to his confusion, she motioned to the gruel, clearly an offer of sort.

…He, liked to hope that he was not desperate enough to eat a mixture of water and beans.

What had been simply an idle cant of refusal, or turning his gaze elsewhere, paused and sharpened- the smell of fresh blood, unlike his own, briefly parted the mists of the chamber.

It appeared that Vigna had dispatched a meagre adversary- one of the nesting aspids- in relocating him. Its body was still fresh.

(...was that an improvement over bean gruel, a part of him wondered. It was… meat, if one was generous in their use of the term.)

He let out a faintly put-upon breath. “...This is exactly the reason why I usually do not eat.”

If Vigna found it an unusual statement, she paid it no more than what he was beginning to suspect was a habit of hers: she considered it silently at length, and then spoke on the matter: “Do as you please,” in this case, and she picked up the bowl of gruel, hesitating rather than bringing it immediately to her mouth.

“A luxury unaffordable.” He picked his way to the aspid, and, mindful of the ownership of the weapon on which it was gored upon, lifted the latter gently to extricate the beast. “This will suffice.”

(It had an impressive heft to it. Not unmanageable, but perhaps not as carefully balanced and wieldy as a soldier’s nail. A small way he had perhaps underestimated her.)

The aspid itself did not appear sickly, and its flesh was clean, on cursory examination. He turned it over in his grasp, when Vigna spoke again.

“I suppose it’s a better idea to treat your, um, injuries first.”

He stilled, and then made a point of repeating the examination of the aspid, even when there was nothing more to examine- a futile gesture, and a cowardly one.

The ache of ooma burns was a fading afterimage. The scrape of the goam, even moreso- trivial in the face of the great font of Soul that poured from the spring. The injury that could be spoken of was the remaining wound of his heart.

Aloud, he merely said, “what you are speaking of cannot be treated. Its current state is stable.”

He would know if it were degrading.

At the same time, it seemed a wretched and pathetic admission, to state aloud the simple fact that had been driving him since before the loss of the kingdom. That his arts and studies had failed. That this singular thing, once so small that he could not have housed the tip of a claw in it, and now large enough that his entire fist could fit in its aperture without touching an edge, would proceed until the rest of his body could not endure in its absence, and nothing mortal nor divine would halt its pace.

With brisk fingers, he pruned the wings from the aspid, made sharp incision with fingertips along the length of its spine, and worked to liberate pieces of its soft and gamey flesh.

Vigna’s voice rose behind him: “Stranger, I do not know much about the hole between your front and back, but if I did, I am certain I would not call it 'stable.'”

…More pathetic still, to stoop to eating simply for the sake of postponing an answer. But having made the choice already, he wouldn’t face her with bloodied mouthparts bared in the open. This, at least, could only be handled in one direction. A small and thankless grace.

\--

Unspoken, when they had both eaten, Vigna prepared to leave with him. In equal silence, she took initiative, leading down a path opposite the goam, nearly back the way they had come but upwards through the rock.

He could have left her at this time. He was certain, even with as pitiful a meal as a single aspid, that he could make his own way to his shelter. And yet, something stayed him- be it a heavily wounded pride, or simply the realization that he had no good reason to deny her hard-fought indulgence of… walking him across the street like he was some invalid elder liable to get lost.

So instead, he fell in behind her, as they passed through the underbelly of the crossroads, lit by pale stalks of subterranean plants. Up a shallow incline, another threshold of ladder-like slopes. He hesitated as little as possible, and, yet, a beetle claw extended in front of him at the last landing.

This time, he did pause, letting his gaze flick from the hand, to Vigna’s face, before he completed the journey himself.

Did she think so little of him, even wingless? Even wounded?

He took initiative, and placed his back to her again.

Above the landing they were on, an opening stretched from above, remnant of a broken staircase crumbled downward into the earth. Stretching vertically, he could reach it with four upper arms and pull the rest of his body onto the platform, before Vigna could attain any new ideas on the subject. Something crinkled under a foreleg- another discarded paper, this one seemingly far older than the one in the basin. Its fragile surface had actually torn from the slight jostling of stepping upon it- on its face was a detailed rendering of the Black Egg Temple, down to painstaking recreation of the crack across its face, where weathering had blunted the tips of its horns.

In the time he had stared at it, Vigna had caught up. He tilted his head, not truly looking at her, but acknowledging her presence, perhaps, and stowed the drawing at a distance from his weeping heart.

They continued.

\--

The next passage had been the site of a cave-in, but the ensuing pile of rubble had settled stably a long time ago, and proved easily surmounted. The sound of crackling torches drifted from above. There was a snail mound in this area- amidst the whorls of ammonites. The placement of such structures and the necropolises they sat upon predated him; he had studied their locations on maps, and found no particular pattern or reason to them. Nor had he needed to; the snails had proven apathetic in his campaign against the ancient light, and they had conceded to his ensuing conquest with a similar sort of shrug. Some, he had been struck with the curious impression they had been expecting him- others were simply indifferent, so long as his work did not till their graves one way or another.

He wondered if this mound was yet tended, or if its caretaker, too, had succumbed to plague. She did not differentiate between those who stood against Her, and those who merely stood aside. 

Ultimately, it was an idle thought, and one that did not compel him to investigate further, reaching the end of that darkened tunnel and stepping out into the light.

What lay there, however, did stop him.

Much he had built, but as Hallownest had grown in scale, precious little of it had been by his own hand. The need of a monarch was the need to become in essence a larger creature, many-eyed and many-limbed; architects, menderbugs, smiths of many stripes- they had become his shaping tools in the kingdom, and they had clamored for a role in Hallownest’s great becoming. 

Forgetting was not in his nature, however, and no work had personally left his hands that he truly did not recall the details of.

Hegemol’s armor, once white, lay on its silver belly, an unfamiliar haft of some stave or pikestaff sprawled as if dropped from his hand. Time had scuffed it- a cast of dirt obscured its finer details- but if there were any doubt in his mind, it was dispelled simply by placing his fingertips on the plates, the fine warp and weave of pale steel.

The visage of the helmet was split open, and the shell lay intact and empty. It was propped slightly on a bed of crumbled stones- a chasm in the ceiling proved likely origin. Near the collar, a small pool of infected blood dribbled from the steel onto the floor, long dried and half flaked away.

It had gleamed white, the day he had ordered evacuation, the mask of the armor closed. Whatever opinion Hegemol had of his orders, he had kept them to himself, and acted quickly. Where retainers had protested, tried to remain in the throne room, Hegemol had moved to attend them, had left precisely the sort of silence his king had needed to focus.

There was very little to hypothesize, thus, about what he had been thinking; of where the knights had gone in the aftermath.

He retrieved his hand from the armor, the faded shape of the king’s brand nearly seeming to ache.

If Vigna protested his dawdling, she said nothing.

That was fine.

\--

The corridor beyond was broad, and full of bodies. A few, he noted, were heavily void-marked as the body he’d retrieved were- another, the body of a Hallownest Crossguard, had collapsed under the weight of infection, a few brittle and desiccated branches still holding it to the floor. Another climb- relatively easy and shallow- and then, mercifully, the beginning of a descent.

Vigna walked beside him, now, a behavior unlike an escorting knight’s, but it reduced the opportunities for her to try and help him navigate the gaps. Her bulk and solidity abetted her, regardless- she could simply leap ahead to the lower platform and land.

As he was about to follow, a high, young voice sounded from the stag station; a small beetle wearing some manner of garish helmet bustled forwards.

In that instant, he slipped past Vigna and downwards, to the next lower landing. He might have moved further, but something inspired him to wait- the relative dimness of him at present worked to his favor.

Above him, Vigna moved to greet the stranger.

“-were looking at all the stops for you-- I was about to go back up if I didn’t find you…”

“What’s wrong? Did something happen?” There was urgency in Vigna’s voice.

The former king, seated below out of sight, lifted his head, turned his attention.

“Oh, nothing really. You were gone for a little while… and it isn’t like you not to say so… I really thought I should look for you! That’s all.”

He settled, exhaled. In a petty moment, he commiserated- could recall retainers falling over themselves in exclamation when he emerged from contemplating a problem, startled at several days’ absence though they would never truly challenge his right to leave.

The thought caught him, and he turned it over in his hands. But Vigna, this humble creature that carried a secondhand farming tool, no badge or symbol or icon of power, nor armor beyond what she was born with- was waited upon in this way, that someone was so concerned after her? The unfamiliar beetle spoke again, and he refocused his attention.

“I walked in my sleep once. I woke up in a nightmare all alone. I don’t know how I even made it so deep down, I thought no one could find me…”

The plague. In its earliest detectable stage, when it distinguished from strange moods, momentary confusion, muttering of unfamiliar words- a faint orange sheen descending upon the eyes, movement in a trance-state mistakable for sleepwalking. The afflicted could be roused at that point- turned back from the edge.

This odd warrior- an unfamiliar sort of knight, or at least one playing at such- had come so close. Feared the same of Vigna. Mere habit in the uncertain silence caused by the plague’s wake, the death of its queen.

And yet, he could not completely shake the first notion that had come to him- that Vigna, in particular, was a loss that had been felt. That this warrior, emerging from the stag stations- a place where walls had been built, walls that Vigna knew well- heeded her in particular.

It chased him, all the way to the cooler passages of the village below, where there was no foreign warmth of living creatures to disrupt him.

If he truly wished to evade Vigna- whoever and whatever she was- returning to his sanctuary, one that she knew its position of, was a poorly conceived idea. If he did not wish to evade her, there was no good reason to flee the sight of someone she confided in. At this very moment, it would have been trivial for Vigna to direct her subordinate to follow him, or guide the strange-helmed warrior down personally.

Silence was his only companion. The aspids that lived in this area had retired, or else had known enough excitement from him that they sought not to trifle further. The long path to the ammonite village was empty, and dark. His vision did not trouble, as it had with the goam, but there was nothing that could not be evaded with ordinary eyes anyway; his light threw ahead of him, as if he had any need to see, the same collapsed furrow in the path one could simply walk around.

The interior of the chapel was dark.

No one asked where he had been. His comings and goings were his, and his alone. He could be so certain of this silence as to settle briefly on a pew shoved aside, part his layers, and consult his wound.

The dark maw of it was no wider, but had been laid bare by the spring cleaning around it, old scab and fragment of shell pried loose. Small drips had been quick to discolor the pale chitin. He swiped at a droplet, held between thumb and forefinger, and held it toward the blackened, desecrated altar.

“Does this please you?” He asked, of the darkness, of the unknown thing that dwelled there- stabbed with some fragile mote of power at it.

There was no answer.

…No, of course there was not.

He lowered his hand, destroyed the droplet with a wipe of light.

He was really far too old to ramble to himself like a plague-maddened thing.


	8. At Every Memory A Grave

He worked through a third of the bodies.

And then half of the tablets. The village had been a quiet one. Ostensibly pious frontiersmen. The official, somewhat lazy, used a form of shorthand common to those who did not believe in etching every single character into stone, but kept dutiful notes regardless. Consulting them, the former king could identify several of the bodies, but many were enigmas.

The simple truth was, he did not know the way Radiance marshaled Her enthralled troops- he’d hardly had time or thought to tie some marker onto a husk, let it wander, and then alert all soldiers to report where exactly it had been slain. Some lurked where they had once lived. Others wandered. The rationale, if there was one, eluded him.

…No, the simplest truth was that he was not getting any work done. Even his attempts to rest, not to take the gift stability of the wound for granted- saw him up and pacing within the hour as if his own edicts had become futile on his flesh. It was as if, somewhere in the worktables of his mind, he had a handful of pieces, all precisely manufactured, and could not for the life of him find the formation they all fit, that cogs’ teeth enmeshed and began to turn.

The earthworks at the stag stations- this ‘Vigna’, and the obedience of others she commanded.

…She had the advantage of communication, of those who would run her reports of the world outside.

That… could be checked, could it not? The black stain on the former altar, mirror-smooth, threw the likeness of his face back at him as if in reproach- he brought a hand to the scar, covering the eye that it passed through.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve already been seen. There’s no sense tarrying further.”

The silence, having no place in the conversation, simply drank his words, and did not believe or disbelieve them.

A pause. The faintest crinkle of his expression.

“…Or, as an alternative, I could remain here, in a closed, empty room, talking to myself.”

He couldn’t think of any judgment passable on his present form that sounded more pathetic than that.

\--

**CHAPTER VIII: AT EVERY MEMORY A GRAVE**

\--

To approach the far door and look beyond, the single lit house on the hill remained so. Only a few strides closer, he could hear that same laughter. Either it had not changed, or it had paused and resumed since then. In the winding path across the stones, there had been a sort of natural stair that had instead become a somewhat unnatural cliff.

His impression of the stranger adjusted. Either the villagers had sought to ostracize, or it was they who’d dug a furrow, deterring husks from access.

Pink furls of smoke tumbled about the open door, and clung low to the ground in a spreading carpet of haze. The odor was- powerful, but earthy. Certain noblemen had affinity for incense burning- thought that it proved them cultured. An insubordinate type had once dared him to attempt to identify the scents- crowed victory when he distinguished, but did not know the names of the individual trees.

That bug had not warranted striking by his own hand; they had been put in place by the time he saw them again. The king, in his own time, had taken some effort to rectify a hole in knowledge, as there was no reason not to. This one, he placed as a local species to Hallownest, not a tree but a broad-flowering woody plant known to laybug as _heartrest_. Burnt and inhaled, it was known for mild psychotropic effects, but to his studies, one habitually smoked the bulbs directly.

There was no door that could be sealed that he discerned- rather, a curtain of ceramic baubles twinkled against each other and his horns, despite attempts to move under them. Within the interior were no less than half a dozen stakes of incense, all wafting their smoke, an archway leading back to a humble living quarters, and far more baubles dangling from the ceiling. The center of the room was dominated by a large slug- far larger than he was anticipating for the size of her abode. Her head- crowned in a cap trimmed by red clay beads- nearly scraped the low spine of her dwelling’s roof, but she hardly seemed to mind, and either way, it was rectified immediately in the most unpleasant manner possible as she shifted forwards immediately, leaning on her counter with a broad smile that attempted welcoming.

“My, hello, who’s this in my humble store? My dear, you have a _marvelous_ understated color to you, and such a complexion! I’m sure you must have set the whole town abuzz just passing through, to visit little old me of all people! I’m aflutter! But please, don’t let me prattle, dear- how can I be of service?”

The former king’s mind latched onto the first thing of that statement that seemed of useful relevance, in a manner he did not want to admit was _quite_ that much like a drowning crawlid seizing a stick to try and pull itself out of water. “You are a merchant of sort, then.”

“Of sort, of sort,” (he quite disliked how this individual toyed his own syllables about.) “Really, if we’re being completely honest I’m more of a collector, but I simply can’t help myself. I’ve an eye for beauty, you know, and these little lovelies just don’t shine their happiest without someone wearing them. I meet someone striking, someone _gorgeous_ , and I really can’t help myself. I’m really rather surprised a person of your carriage isn’t wearing any already!”

He shifted fractionally on his lengths. “…What, specifically?”

“These, of course!” With surprising speed, the slug retrieved a case and opened it in front of him.

What met his eyes was a triple row of small, gleaming ornaments, the size of the average beetle’s clawtip. No two were the same, and, yet, he recognized the meaning of them at once.

Charms, then. And the case like this one held in front of him- he could spot, just in his peripheral vision, more than eight like it lying closed in different parts of the store.

A collector indeed. He studied her- this flashy, scatterbrained-seeming creature- and attempted to discern by exterior what element she retained within, and failed.

For her part, she only made a great show of twittering, lowering the case and raising a hand to her face instead. “You have quite an intense stare. I might blush! I imagine you’re already a little acquainted with charms, and that’s why you’re giving me that look. There’s nothing untoward about it, let me be the first to reassure you. I know I’m the talk of the town sometimes, but if I’m to be completely honest, it’s all because I simply love people! Some of the most unexpected bugs glitter so beautifully underneath. You can’t judge by appearances, dear. Why, I had a frequent customer a while ago, a most elegant and striking sort. A bit like yourself, mm?”

She had his attention immediately. “ _A bit like myself_ , in what way?”

“Oh, hmm. I was thinking mostly of the composure, the reservedness, but, now that I really mention it…” she tipped her head, a jingle of beads, and scrutinized him more closely. “…Yes, yes, definitely, you have similar faces. Why, if I saw the two of you together, I might’ve guessed relatives!”

Something stilled in his innards.

The merchant, it seemed, was the sort to spill her every emotion with no hesitation. Or perhaps the amount of incense she was burning rendered her so chatty. “Quite an aloof sort, I can’t say I ever heard them so much as speak a word, but they were quite the connoisseur. Started their own collection before they ever met me, I remember that one well! It was an exquisite color of red, and the sweeping details. Hardly a surprise they didn’t speak much, with a bold statement like that on their shell. Hm, but I think they seemed a bit more carefree when they stopped wearing it. That’s fine. There’s a charm for every occasion and an occasion for every charm, and all.”

He resisted the urge to bring a hand to his temples, and simply instead put it to use signaling her attention, lest she continue prattling about charms. “This customer of yours. Were they tall?”

“Rather small. Smaller than you, I would say, horns and all, if I must gossip.”

“And how much time is ‘a while ago’?”

He was faintly vindicated to see her actually give it thought. “Hm. You know, it’s been the most interesting thing down here. I don’t leave my home all that much, but it’s been strange. Probably about a season, but the strangest thing is actually that things have felt more… ordinary, lately? Almost like waking up from a dream, mhm. Before you came along, I was nearly worried, with all of the quiet. I always like to be found in the same place, but I did consider moving.”

Before he could thread through most of that, she brightened again. “Ohoho, of course, now you’re here brightening things up! Surprised you liked the look of that old temple. I always found it a bit of a dreary place, but you certainly bring _something_ to it. Do let me know if you need any help or spare furnishings, will you? It’s been so long since I’ve brought anyone a housewarming gift, but this was such a nice village. It wouldn’t do to have it be inhospitable now.”

“That will not be necessary.” He had already overstayed, but he paused at the door, supposing she had been of use. “Thank you.”

“Don’t be a stranger, dear.”

She seemed to find this amusing- a sort of private joke of her own. Her laughter followed him out.

\--

Whether accomplishing something had taken his mind off previous concerns or he was simply exhausted from a single conversation with someone who had that much to prattle at, he slept successfully, and dreamlessly, and roused to the distinct feeling it was dawn somewhere above him.

It was odd to greet the sentiment without unease. Something like daylight. Perhaps, eventually, it would mean nothing to anyone; perhaps it did already.

Was that what it meant, when a god was truly dead?

…No, that was folly to consider. He had lapsed, unforgivably, in vigilance before. _She_ was in remission. That did not mean gone. That did not mean forever.

The thought drove him into movement, and the prospects of attending to something within the chapel left him ill at ease. Perhaps he was simply adjusting to how much distance walking he had done in the last several days, and it felt wrong to be stationary.

He had progressed down the thoroughfare and up the first few ledges of an ascent before it struck him that if he had no purpose to this errand, it was probably better not undertaken.

He knew where he was going, certainly. But it wasn’t as if Hegemol would be there, in any state.

Even if, in the imagined world where he was, what precisely did one say? The tradition on these sort of occasions… he supposed that mortal creatures made apologies. Conversations they were too cowardly to have with the subject in life.

An apology to Hegemol?

For what? That he perished alone, and not in the line of his duty? That he held his duty in the first place?

What was there to say? What use was saying anything, when it would only fall on deaf ears?

It was quiet in the cave. A wild lumafly drifted closer to him, making a lazy circle of his horns.

…He ought to look. It seemed remiss not to bear witness.

He climbed.


	9. Arrogance and Aftermath

Unlike before, the stag station was quiet, at least externally. He did not venture inside, or permit it to delay him. It was only sensible to do so, he affirmed, resting a few legs on the rim of a fallen metal frame to better reach a higher platform. A meandering vengefly threw itself at him; unarmed and hands occupied, he lifted his head and stunned it with a pulse of light into its weakened eyes. It dropped, missing the lower landing and out of sight. Whether or not the fall killed it was of no consequence so long as it did not return and try again, so he set his intentions to climbing once again.

It was easier to move down, than to move up. The nature of Hallownest’s roads were the nature of the caverns they passed through, but at least in the past, these paths had been more paved, more smoothed, more- beholden to _dignity_ , he thought darkly, positioning to the left of a tiktik that crawled past him.

The faded garrison lay ahead of him, the now-familiar sight of the overgrown guard.

Beyond it… a disturbance. The bodies had shifted positions. Not in the way of the dead returned, but more of them had been rolled onto their backs, strewn as if they’d been rummaged through and pushed aside to clear the path.

He would not admit to a hastened tread.

\--

**CHAPTER IX: ARROGANCE AND AFTERMATH**

\--

Hegemol’s armor lay where it had.

A stranger was pacing around it- one that would’ve given even Vigna pause, had she been here. They were about her size, but their broad head sported homegrown advantages- a pair of sharp, curving jaws. In stubby claws, they’d lofted the pikestaff, but swung it to point its blunt tip at his face on approach.

“That’s close enough. This is my find, and I don’t like the look of you.”

Halted by their spacing gesture, he did not bristle, but rather stilled. “You have no idea what you are speaking of.”

The beetle’s pincers tipped to the side. “Good for me. I don’t care. Look, maybe you’re new to this- some fellow topside gave me a yarn about the whole place being cursed- but when I say _this is my find_ , I don’t care if you knew it was here or you have some sob story.” The hand not holding the staff flicked their cloak aside, and rested meaningfully on the battered grip of a nail. “This is your last opportunity to get out of here.”

His eyes narrowed. “How magnanimous of you. And how foolish.”

The stave was not his work. It was a mundane sort of steel; plenty durable, for workman’s uses, but it knew not of light. A threefold pass of scintillating cold and it buckled, clattered to pieces and in the moment the scavenger’s head snapped around to regard it, the former king lunged.

He had underestimated them only slightly- they had good instincts, and fell back to protect their throat from his grasp, making a slash on his forwards arm with their nail that caught more sleeve than it did chitin. They slid into their newfound positions- the scavenger well back, and himself, banishing the injured arm from sight beneath his layers.

“What are you?”

There was fear in their eyes.

_As it should be._

“Per your own terms, when one _lays a claim_ in this sort of context, they permit the other’s withdrawal.” He let his light aggregate, pool into his palm. “This is your opportunity to retreat.”

Rage clouded fear. With purpose, the scavenger straightened themselves, flung their cloak aside and drew a second weapon.

So be it.

He sprayed a volley of shining daggers, and the scavenger sprang over them, spreading their wings and taking to the upper reaches of the chamber, the hole in the ceiling. To cast his light into the space above them merely to track proved futile, he hunkered instead, pressing palms to the stone and waited.

They did not keep him waiting long- a dive from behind, rather than a lunging pass- he sprang, skittered, about-faced at the rear of the chamber. Once again, they stood, facing each other over the curve of Hegemol’s armor.

A wet _splat_ of black ichor struck the stones. The pain he habitually overlooked clamored for attention.

“So you do bleed,” the scavenger mused, almost conversationally. “Good to know.”

“Arrogance itself, to presume you could draw it from me.”

A scoff. “You’re awfully scared of my nails for something that thinks itself immortal.”

“That is quite enough.”

He gathered soul. An inadvisable amount of soul. It did not stand upon its own, but poured into the stones, tore cobbles aside and shattered and reforged the ancient fossil spirals. Crystals of ice and stone burst gleaming in twin arcs, narrowing the field and raining fragments of tile over the both of them. His next strike plunged low, gathered itself in shifting and rumbling earth.

The scavenger proved quick-footed again, taking wing, but he had meant his declaration. The spire that erupted where their feet had been rocketed upwards, large enough and accelerating sharply. They saw it coming- flung sideways, breath wasted on cursing. It clipped the breadth of them, pierced a wing close to the joint and they fell.

He approached at walking pace, the spines that separated them shattering at his touch. Against the haze of his condition, rage sharpened every point, fixed wavering shapes in precise reflections at the back of his eye.

It was so simple. That he had not thought of it earlier would glimmer as embarrassment if he were in the position to feel such a thing.

Flung from the air by damaged wing, they groveled on the earth nearly as if supplicant.

He halted before them, stared down at their shoulders. A bug of lawless origin- of the mindless lands beyond his world. Without eye nor ear-slit for that which had come before, for his own edict upon the land that had become its epitaph- _bear witness_ \- and they did not.

“Leave this place and do not return, and you will live.”

They surged forwards- his shoulders struck earth before he realized. The horizon collapsed to the two of them- and a single nail, between, pressed in the groove of his throat- it bore downward, its bite stung him-

-he screamed.

\--

Gradually, in the silence of the space, he found it in himself to climb out from under the still body. With a shove, it lolled to the side, and he came back onto unsteady legs, gasping quietly. A hand rose to staunch his throat- when it came away, it was stained unlike blackness, but a white that stung at even his eyes. His exterior ached, but moreso the inside of him burned- the effort of voicing what he had took its toll inexorably.

He lifted his gaze to the room, that which had been once empty and quiet, a grave even if an unsuited one, and beheld the ugliness that desperation and possessive rage had wrought of it.

Such things. Unsightly emotion was always his vice.

It came so easily.

What things did Hegemol’s memory deserve? What things was one expected to do, in observance of a funeral? Lamentations, memories. Kindly words, seemly constructions. Nothing a child was ever taught, but the lowest of wretches commanded by birth.

If he must stoop himself to feeling, bowed under the weight of everything else, why did they not bring with them the art of such things? Not even aristocracy- he had witnessed mere commoners grieve, the few times his eye cast upon them. Aymich had destroyed themselves for it, and, yet, here _he_ was, crumbling either way.

_Don’t be ridiculous_ , he chided himself, but, all of his options at this point were ridiculous. The only sensible thing, he had failed at a long time ago, and something about making his way back to the basin and the wreck of the palace to die, or even damning propriety to perish elsewhere- he could simply bleed out here, for simplicity’s sake…

…He couldn’t. He lingered in ruined space, without proper words or procedure for anything.

What did one do?

…The image of barricades mounted before stag stations rose to the surface of his thoughts.

Fortified.

He returned to the body, turned it over and saw that one hand still grasped a nail. It did not yield to tugging, but precise cuts at the segments in the fingers surrendered it easily.

His pale blood gleamed at him from the edge of the weapon.

He stirred to comment, but it was eclipsed by coughing.

In silence, then, he carried the interloper’s weapons away from that place.

\--

It came down to the simple fact that the process of having a body at all, despite vastly outshining the alternatives, was miserable work. By the time that he had made it back to his forsaken little grotto, his robes had become sullied again, even moving slowly, with a hand staunching the wound to his throat. He left shadows, contemplated the logistics of their removal, and ultimately decided against, choosing simply to drag the weary length of himself home.

Home. And how easily in fatigue he was slipping these days, with neither energy nor patience to return and correct. His tread was low, his underbelly dragged across the floor of the little chapel until he could climb onto one of the low stone benches and huddle there, curled on himself, tail looped before his front-most legs.

If he were not profoundly alone of his kindred, he would wonder if anyone who’d known him in the past would recognize the thing before them now. It was a thought that made him grateful of the gloomy place and its discarded altar, that even where his own symbol faced him it might as well be a cloakstand.

With a steadying breath, he banished the world behind his eyelids and then faced it again.

The fact stood that he could feel sorry for himself as much as he pleased, but he had to resolve the problem at hand, preferably sometime before his shining blood wholly left his body. The scavenger’s inflicted wound was not dire, but it was concerning to let lie.

Vigna had proposed bandages, but as far as he knew she had taken those with her to wherever lay beyond the stagway fortifications. Above the temple.

…He recalled there was a hamlet of sorts up there; one just barely larger than the one he now squatted in the ruins of.

The notion of limping to it in shambles was certainly worse than perishing ignobly in solitude.

That left, of the people who already knew his position, and thus, that he lost nothing to seeking out, only one other person: the charm collector.

She had made it clear that she was interested in being… ‘neighborly’. He would hold her to that, then, but not without payment. Entering anyone’s debt at this point would bode poorly.

(as if he did not owe already.)

A charm should be trivial to create. He pushed from his resting position, and focused on what he knew of such things- and his own experience fabricating them. Precise results were very difficult; a blank template without defined interest would not capture a collector’s eye.

Glancing at the doors- on wary reflex more than anything- he shed his robe.

Another breath to focus himself. He coughed sharply- doubled over himself, and had to reset. His vision swam worryingly, but did not fade or pound with darkness. 

He focused until he could gather soul at his core, press and mold it into shapes that it would hold. That was the easy part. He could, in any state besides flat unconscious, shape soul.

What was far more difficult was the point of releasing it, a handful at a time, to prowl his body freely. His light brightened, rippled and swam over the surface, his eyes tracking the imperfections in its movement and fighting down the urge to correct them. Without refinement, it pulsed with every movement. The shape he sought inside of himself was one that energy could settle into naturally- forcing it wouldn’t suffice.

He plunged a hand into himself, felt, seized something that had a narrow stem like a plant, and could be plucked.

Tore it out, a white-cold point rapidly heating itself to room temperature and hissing as it went. It gleamed against the black ichor that covered his fingers. When it was dim enough to be studied by the eye, he transferred it to a clean hand.

It was a larger charm, with three teeth protruding from its back where it would set into a wearer’s shell. A frill of functionless spikes, pale and silvery, set out from its edge in a circle. In the center of it- as were in many charms- was a mask, this one with drooping eye-slits and a visage split vertically.

That it had power was obvious to behold, but what that power entailed, he could not ascertain.

It would do.

He replaced his garments, and went to seek Salubra.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Chosen Anguish ]  
>  _Silver charm embodying the futility of martyrdom. Wounds and weakens the bearer in exchange for greatly amplifying spellcasting power._


	10. The Burdens Of Need

The laughter stopped as he entered the room, a change he could not be sure if he should find welcome or stressful. He did not read the difference in Salubra’s expression, because the formerly trivial effort of crossing from the chapel to her abode had proven arduous. His will could only hold blood from the wound in his neck so well- his body did not heed its master and architect as it once did. It had left him bent at the upper segments, both of his right hands clinging to the open threshold of her home.

He felt more than saw her approach, and thrust the hand grasping the charm outwards in what he gathered was her direction.

“I come in bargain.”

At such times, one sought to be certain. To show not fear, or uncertainty. A wretched thing that fate had done, more inspired and clever than any wound She had ever raised against him in all of Her efforts to destroy him- to force him to engage in all of his old works in such a miserable state. Even his words left at a bare, scraping whisper below their usual; each one trawled its way up a throat scored from without and carved by howling force within.

A silence stretched in the cloying air, long enough that he caught his breath and lifted his head.

Salubra was regarding not the charm, but him directly. There was no particular amusement in her expression, and without it, the visage was nearly foreign, as little as he could claim any sort of familiarity with it ordinarily. Eyes were yet obscured behind their lashes, thick and softened lips- lips, of all things, not anything bound in chitin like a proper face and worn nakedly, painted even-

-pulled in a line one could not differentiate if it was a frown, or simply thought.

There was pity in her gaze, and it was a sharp and hungering thing.

He found he had no particular desire to look at her face any longer. Fortunately, she took the charm from him, gathered it in a soft appendage mindful of its edges, and with another hand to his shoulders that he neither needed nor wanted, she ushered him to a low seat on a raised cushion.

From a position rear to the counter, he could study the whole of this chamber. Salubra, it appeared, made her entire life in this one small room- the trinkets from the ceiling swaying slightly as she disrupted them, her digitless grasp moving with surprising dexterity to drawer chests and piled caches, amidst pots and baskets that held dried stores of food and medicine and other things that she did not seek at the moment.

He wondered why someone who had the resources and skill to amass such a hoard of charms, a thing most paid for with their very lives, would stay in a cramped confine that she had to bow her head to move about.

In a brief and irrational moment, he wondered if this was how the few retainers who had ever stepped, blinking, into the gloom of the palace workshop regarded him forested amongst the inert and waiting molds.

The moment passed. They were nothing alike, that place and this. Missing the palace was understandable, but to think poorly of his own works was doubt he could not afford.

A damp hand rested under the point of his chin and lifted, and he obliged with the stiff unease of one who was not meant to be touched carelessly by others. It was a virtue of control, then, that Salubra’s touch, so close to where his mandibles met beneath his mask, did not warrant her losing a hand.  _ I sought her assistance _ , he reminded himself.  _ It is pointless to argue with the methodology. Provided it works. _

It was more difficult to permit her coax his hand away from the wound. To her credit, if she had never seen the blood of god or wyrm before, she did not acknowledge it more than a blink- noted by a swish of those concealing eyelashes- and the slightest jingling tilt of her head. The other hand, which had come to probe, hesitated instead- made a complex movement. Foreign soul swept him- not in the way of offering yielded, but seething with intent. It lingered, prickling, at the cut of his throat, in patches about the faded ooma strike, and pressed most prominently against his chest. 

In an instant, every plate upon his body bristled on end. His own soul flared to the edges of his shell, promised scathing retaliation-

-he herded it back, motionless, to his core, but his grip on his robes tightened. 

“My dear, I never presume about my customers,” Salubra murmured, not looking up from the wound at his throat, “but you certainly have the capacity to heal yourself. Do you enjoy my company this much?” A little laugh, soft, but of a very different creature than the ones that bubbled so easily from her previously. “I’m only teasing. At least some of these shouldn’t be difficult. No need to work yourself up about it.”

With his situation nakedly apparent to her thanks to that spell she had cast ( _ A spell! Worked by a lesser creature! With what misbegotten soul? _ A treacherous part of him looked on in genuine curiosity) he simply stared her down, and settled his position, smoothing his plates by force where his nerves would not appease themselves.

A difficult task, as she took that moment to clean the wound, and to see his own blood away from himself was a revulsion almost deeper than he could bear.

She secured a second, unsoiled cloth over her hand before dipping it to a pot of golden-colored salve, which she put to the wound at his throat. It was a sticky substance- one he thought he recognized. Hallownest had never dealt with the Hive, not directly, but travelers and moths had once made use of the honey they produced for several purposes. Including wound care.

A strange fortune to find him now. Stranger still that he received this boon at the behest of a sorceress, of all things.

Over the honey, Salubra layered gauze that gleamed silver to his vision. It had the texture of silk. Costly expenses for someone of a ‘quiet village’. “Now, dear, you probably won’t need too much more for this, even if something’s interrupting your ability to heal… which, I’m certainly not about to pry, but I have a guess.”

He deigned to meet that statement with a faint sound of contempt.

Salubra chuckled, more genuinely. “You really don’t have to give me that look. I’ve been nice and quiet all the seasons I’ve lived here, mhmm. My neighbors used to love coming by for a chat. And knowing these sorts of things does make it so much easier to get by, don’t they?”

He briefly conceded it was impressive how much she’d read into his reaction accurately. Perhaps she truly had crossed paths with- and done business with- a vessel, if she read the silent and masked so easily.

It didn’t change that it was knowledge she should not have. 

“My, you’re a skeptical one! Really, it’s true. I might’ve been a touch rebellious in my day, but, well, I’m sure you’d have heard about it if I was stirring things up.” And her expression slid to something even stranger than her sharp-eyed quietness- introspection. “Dear Bagby even sought me out for help with a headache he was having. That was his house you were rummaging about in earlier, with the tablets.” 

Salubra shrugged slightly. “Well. I’m happy they’re doing you good, dear. My headache cure didn’t do much for Bagby in the end.”

He breathed, cautiously, testing the shift of the bindings. No new blood welled to eat its way through the honeyed silk. He stood, and Salubra did not move to stop him, though she did make a point of setting two rolls of silk out on the counter. To the side of them was the charm, that she settled finally to prod at.

“Am I correct in thinking, my dear, that you made this little beauty?”

Seeing no particular danger in the question, he nodded.

She hummed, and fell to silence until he had taken one of the bolts and proceeded to the door.

“I hope you feel a little lighter without it.”

Even if he were capable of it, he would have nothing to say.

\--

**CHAPTER X: THE BURDENS OF NEED**

\--

He sealed both doors of the chapel before disrobing to apply Salubra’s offered boon. He reminded himself, firmly, that he had succeeded at his objectives, which was the mark of successful negotiation. The sense of foreboding that crawled around his entrails disregarded it entirely, which marked it as utterly irrational, and, yet, it persisted.

Spiders’ silk. What possible trade routes carried to this forgotten corner of the Crossroads? None that the official- Bagby, Salubra claimed- had ever noted. So who was she, then, to have claim to imported goods? The beasts permitted very few to take their treasure. At least, they hadn’t in Herrah’s days…

_ Gleaming white masks, carved of shell or bone, reflected back his own light. They ringed the edge of his luminescence, their dark and robed bodies hidden in the deep shadows of their Nest.  _

__ _ He spread his wings, filled the circle with greater light; in seething, crawling mass all of the spiders shrank backward. _

__ _ All but one. In her eyes he beheld not the fury of a lightless beast whose opposite pressed to its face, but the contempt of intellect. The sixfold slits of her mask were harshly composed. And in the circle surrounding them, he could pluck from the crowd now- facsimile upon facsimile of her likeness, stolen for strength by these more timid sorts. _

__ _ The mantises had conveyed to Dryya, in their own sense, that there were many beasts in the shadowed land, but there was only one Beast. Queen and brood. _

__ Then, as well as any time after that, he had never truly understood Herrah. 

In the privacy of a darkened space, he conceded that he understood precious few creatures. One imagined that lower beings were quite simple; they only lived so long, only thought so much. And yet to engage with them at any length was to come out bewildered. A collector of strange treasures should be pleased to gather a new one. Pleased, and no more. Acquisition was so simple a need that the basest creatures knew it and only the highest of beings conquered it. 

So simple. Any piece of rock might have a history some thousands of years old and yet it could be known in the truest and most finite sense. What a stone asked for, it could be accommodated or denied and the results were very predictable. 

Piece by piece, the hole in his body disappeared under cloth. 

What drove bug and beast to such things? If it was truly gods, then he should have been able to polish them to perfection. And yet, whether he sought worshipers from those who came to him, or those shaped by his own hand-

_ -the chain loops in the pauldrons jutted. Unseemly. He shattered the design in his hands and flung it aside, sat to begin anew on a fresh tablet. The urgency of the occasion pressed in at all points but the Hollow Knight was perfect. Pure. He could not fetter them with anything imperfect. The materials lay tantalizingly within reach, begging to be shaped, but purest clarity jangled frustratingly out of reach- _

__ _ -an ache in the chest, and the burning pinprick waiting for him as soon as his gaze turned to the future. Her hatred boiled. She did not divert Her attention, no matter what minds Her contagion seized.  _

__ _ Well. She would be no trouble, soon enough.  _

__ -The white of the gauze formed an unblemished bridge from his waist to his throat. Between that, and his still fairly recent bath, he was in more civilized shape than he had been since awakening. It seemed nearly a shame to return to his robes, which were so tattered and stained by comparison. The clawtips of one hand picked at the lower edge of the scar in his visage- possibly, even that could be fixed… 

No.

The very notion of removing it… 

His stomach writhed. Empty again. He would have to fill it- how quickly and inconveniently it begged. Larger prey, perhaps.

When he could so easily become unmoored in his own thoughts, need was a fruitful anchor. Its refusal to be forgotten kept him focused and sharpened that attention.

And yet if he were to hunt, the wounds would slow him down. Even treated and held, he felt it under the skin. That conflict had been an embarrassment before all else- too close. If he had decreed death, the interloper ought never to have touched him. Even early in the decay a half-maddened would-be assassin, lunging at him with shining nails flung from afar, had not drawn a drop of his blood, even when he had permitted their nails strike true as a demonstration in futility. 

Unbidden in this airless space, he recalled the odor of the heartrest from Salubra’s abode. The plague that had ravaged her village, but left her be.

His eye traveled to the two beaten nails now languishing in a corner of his abode. His mind traveled to barricades and patched farm tools.

He lay his robes out on the floor, one beside the other, and studied them for what they once had been, remnants of embroidery and tattered hemlines, the faded material still attempting in its own weakened sense to be white.

Then, with a pinpoint of soul at a fingertip, he set to cutting them apart.


	11. Armament

To take apart and make new was a process that he had known for almost the entirety of his existence. The _taking apart_ in particular came to him with effortless ease. When he had lived in the emptiness beyond Hallownest, when he had known nothing but animal need, his voice and light in raw force shattered almost anything that came before him. The ring of his jaws had stayed bright and sharp and untarnished.

(He had a sense that it should not be so- to look upon the bodies of the ancient wyrms, the husk of the blackwyrm as it had crawled from the abyss bore horns jagged and scraped and serrated with a thousand centuries. Of labor? Of duels? Whatever the case, whether by youth, by isolation, or by power, he had not shared such blemishes. Even now the facsimiles that lay upon his brow were one of the only things untainted about himself.) 

To reassemble was an art learned, mastered, and, he was disgusted to realize, rusted with disuse. Now, paused on a platform overlooking the stilled lifts of the city storerooms, his thoughts returned distractedly to his cloak, its coloration dulled by ink to the blues that better suited a traveler- and hid much of his light, for all that its shortened length bared more of his body.

With his upper pair of hands, he adjusted his burden across the wingless shallow of his back, and commanded his buzzing thoughts school themselves. He could not drop what he carried, nor carelessly injure himself on the descents below. More than an imperative, it would simply be- not an end, as it may for a lesser creature, but _very unpleasant_ , to wound himself beyond the ability to move.

His leap to the first platform was nearly graceful- the movement carried forward from his hindmost legs something like a releasing spring to push the rest of him precisely where he aimed. The immodest shortness of wayfarer’s attire needed no adjustment nor management, left two limbs free and grasping before he redirected them to the ledge. 

Efficient.

Miscalculation on the next jump, but not catastrophically. The segments of his tail swatted a discarded shell drum from the ledge and sent it cascading to the ground below, where it struck and cracked. Quite a ways down.

He rectified his errors on the third leap, and for the fourth, simply gripped the platform surely with his legs, crept to the underbelly of it like a prowling tiktik, and then extended until the distance to the landing immediately below was not so great, and he could simply drop without jostling his chest.

His chest, which stayed dry, its stain hidden easily.

As if it were such a trivial problem. As if he were a mere mortal to be appeased with the frippery of- food and bandages.

Hanging from the fourth platform by his arms this time, he swept a discarded rickshaw to one side to secure his landing site and dropped shortly after he heard it strike the unyielding stone beneath. Yes, he supposed he was in fact seeking practical solutions for practical problems. To take himself aside in this way, he could nearly imagine the thought voiced by a hand-wringing retainer squalling about how one did not simply venture into the deep shadows beyond the kingdom, as if impropriety cared when the godless decided to set fang on _his_ workers.

He had work to do. It came with an obligation to put himself into a shape that could tolerate work. Unless, of course, he sneered in silence to himself, he would find it more decorous to seek out the regions of floor he hadn’t graced with a royal audience yet.

He had nothing to say to himself.

Rather than find this entire internal conflict absurd, he cleared the last hop, settling adjacent to the rickshaw, with a sense of content he had not felt since awakening in the palace ruins. 

Now then. Making such remarkable time on his errand, he might as well see about the further frippery of a proper meal.

\--

**CHAPTER XI: ARMAMENT**

\--

...Which was well and good to say, if one did not remember that the City, impeccably sealed, held little but the bodies of its former denizens.

Meat was meat, argued the newly-forged sensible mask of his instincts. These creatures lay dead beyond all hope of revival. If he could use their bodies for one purpose-

-study and consumption were entirely separate things, he told himself, head bowing slightly to pass below an overhang. Desecrated by plague and by execution, they were still his subjects-

The warning of foresight halted his hand seconds before brushing away the tattered cloth that hung before him. Digits curled in the air, tilting his head with a momentary blink to try and make sense of the vision. Multiple unknown factors left it a curious haze on the back of his eyelids, but something-

The scraping footfalls of a bug moving below. Clatter of armored plates- relative swiftness. Whoever-it-was cleared a ledge with agility, and little more than a grunt.

In a moment, kingly propriety whisked away to animal reflex- of the sort that knew what to make of a tunnel, a blind corner, and possible prey. Small advantage conferred that his current state had dimmed him so- he drew back, lower arms braced against the stone amidst his legs. 

A gray domed head rose above the floor, and began to turn in his direction.

With a keening shriek, a belfly dove from its perch in the high arches. While he had not seen it, it hadn’t seen him either- its obsession and the ensuing searingly-orange explosion were meant only for the hapless intruder, who made a strangely cut-off cry and fell back out of sight.

The air cooled gradually in silence.

...Well now. That clarified a few parameters of his vision. Directing his gaze both presently and forwards in time upward to the ceilings, he could find no further resting belflies, nor dislodged earth that might fall upon him.

He moved to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was a great deal of soot from the belfly’s final moment, but most curiously, no sign of the creature it had perished upon.

Hm.

He looked forwards. He knew this path, could cast it in his mind’s eye vividly; it was the same he had climbed up from the palace but a few nights ago, and to unfocus his gaze on the present and plunge deeply in the future, he contemplated-

… proceeding cautiously...

… proceeding as he had...

… if he charged ahead, swiftly and carelessly, shed the weighing burden for more speed… 

The hazy sheen of his third eyelids parted, and he was alone in the present of the room once more. No avail. There was nothing to be found, at least nothing his vision could dislodge for him, up until the rickety lift that would take him down to the docks.

He recalled a goam’s bite on his abdomen, and reminded himself that his vision was not perfect these days. At that thought, he reached behind himself, and drew one of the scavenger’s nails he carried.

Point-first, he proceeded downward in two hops, to first one empty landing, then after a short hall, to another. Rain drummed placidly on the glass wall that marked the curve of the tower. All was undisturbed.

His heart had sped up, which proved disquieting, as he could feel its flutters keenly in the wound on his throat. But the lift was ahead, and he gathered himself onto it, before- electing not to stretch up on his segments- he brought the point of the oversized nail up to the elevator lever, and pushed it to the side, letting the lift slide downwards in a silence only broken by rain and the sibilant choir of the chains and gears.

\--

To the western reach of the city, the rain quieted and the air became thick with spores. They did not block the eye as much as the humidity did elsewhere- his destination loomed clear upon the slopes.

The nailsmith’s forge appeared unlit. No smoke escaped the chimney.

With the whole of the way bare before his eyes and possessing nothing more threatening than a solitary vengefly, he holstered his borrowed weapon. It was unseemly in its balance, and handling it when it was not necessary would only risk dropping him from the slick pavers to the gorged canals beneath.

As he traversed, moving island to island in small jumps and reaching maneuvers, he trawled the depths of his memories to wonder if he had ever in Hallownest’s infancy done this much… bouncing about from place to place like a hopper.

...No. It struck him that for the most part, he had simply tunneled without regard for the natural curvature of the caves nor with specific destinations in mind. 

He had also tunneled directly into a nest of garpedes at least once. That had been the eventful day of discovering that a small body was more fragile than a large one, even if hewn of the same materials.

Ah. The follies of youth.

The vengefly made an earnest attempt at diving for his eyes, mandibles gaping. He caught it in a free hand, picked the head and wings from the body, and ate it in three bites. 

Disappointing. But he was becoming at least accustomed to the taste of them.

The mushrooms proved slick footing and some of his legs were recalling their previous grievances. He bent at the top of the slope and massaged them with his fingertips, finding the points in the chitin where bruised flesh lay underneath. 

And yet, his throat hurt little. He could nearly forget the sensation.

The abode of the nailsmith had been abandoned for some time. The stillness of the interior greeted his cold body with a welcome familiarity even beyond that of the City. No warm breath had visited for a very long time. Dust lay on its few surfaces. Even to cast about in the steel belly of the forge, he could find no heat. However, all was in its place; a single light hung at the far of the room over a worktable, low enough one could access it from lying on the floor. Its work-beaten surface was clean. A small chest in the corner, heavy with geo and untouched by scavengers. The inner wall of the place was ringed with nails; some fine and delicate, some so large that he would have once considered them for a quite stalwart watchbug indeed. He retrieved one from its holster in stone and silence, and brightened himself to better appraise it in that light. 

Despite rough treatment, it was an exquisite edge; well-balanced and keenly sharpened. Beautiful, even, with the faint telltale shimmer that suggested the smith had worked pale ore into the material. 

Any but a master’s eye would struggle to find imperfection in it. He retrieved the other weapons in the dwelling and lay them out. The most of them were pieces of similar caliber; a few others were of humbler make, and he could nearly see where the forge-bug’s hammer had sulked over this piece. Vanity, arrogance, but, for those things, a perfectionism he could respect. They had no idol of his gracing their workplace, and, yet, they venerated an altar he found far holier: the pursuit of purity. 

But here, now, these discarded wretches… 

Pale steel. The ratios were not poor. It was possible…

He regarded with greater interest the shape of the forge. Its funnel, and valves. Places where the city air could be funneled by artifice to precise blasts.

Whoever had lived here once, they had left their coal. Tools as well. He gathered them to himself, evaluated their edges and shapes. Not the things he had once cut shining and pure white materials with, but they would do.

He cast his cloak aside, and began the work of stoking the flames. There was a serenity to the work, even as the temperature in the isolated space steepened and began to prickle at the shell of him. Heat was not his essence- had once been the mantle borne by his most dire of enemies, but all things had their use. And pale steel- purer than iron, a thing refined and reborn in the very entrails of his vanished and esoteric kindred- was nearly impossible to work at any temperature that a mortal creature could stand. The hearth warmed, spilled its gold unto the world, warred against him for brilliance.

He seized it, and struck into its heart a thing the smith would never have known to use- faint and gleaming filigree to herd and capture the untamed heat, a blaze of soul to ignite the primal character of the smokerock below. A crucible, to hold the material when it gleamed first red, then yellowing as it heated- 

Then, when it was nearly blue, opening the veins of his palm, prying plates apart, to yield precise dosage: three drops of shining blood.

When Hallownest had begun to unfurl, its form glimpsed by the eyes of mortal bugs, they had called his works divine. Had called him a god, and cast that name unto him, a name unlike any She had hurled, or that his lady had obliged.

As in most affairs, they did not realize the truth of their statement- that ancient blood made both a god, and his works. Of what he had made, none of it could be separated from him. 

He fed the second nail into the blaze, and compressed the space they now inhabited jointly until it trembled from the grip. The haze of the heat was disorienting, infuriating; he did not relinquish his grip on what had left him. As its nature began to reject the fire, the pressure must be absolute- just as light commanded void, and void, in concentration, commanded light- its opposites would define its bounds.

He pressed until he could tolerate no longer; plunged the weapon into the silent depths of the water next to the forge and himself to the floor in no greater dignity, hacking until the ash left his aching lungs.

When he mustered the strength to lift his head, in a crawl with the most of his length horizontal, he saw himself to the trough and retrieved the thing to appraise it.

It had not lost everything. Details had crystallized out of an uncertain shape; the winding root-likeness of the shaft was unmistakable. But it would take more; more to settle the thing, and work beyond to ignite it.

He discarded his exhaustion to the ground beside his cloak, and plunged back after the image in his mind.

\--

To stagger, blinking, from the forge to the comparative gloom of the cavern an uncertain span of hours later, and press his back to the cooling exterior of the structure, the former king felt that he had possibly made a mistake. Certainly, every wounded patch of his body rebuked him- what little his Focus could do in this state would rectify nothing, and the length of him sang its ever-growing chorus of grievances. 

At least the retainers had the civility to wait their turn, although they also squandered his time by groveling…

The grip of his uppermost arms tightened on his prize.

Not in vain.

It resonated yet with the labors of its creation, almost as long as his body but nearly weightless and luminous silver, defiant to the shadows in the way of pure weapons. He juggled it in hand, pulled his weary head down to stare at it once more. How pure, the precise measurements, he could not be certain. He had neither the tools, nor the clear head to make full use of his own faculties. 

And yet, something sang at the sight. Work, made by his own hands. Sensible, useful, and, if vanity was permitted, beautiful.

It had been…

Gods. It had been centuries.

He pressed the aching bellows of his lungs, forcing out a breath that was too warm for comfort. The cavern air laid welcome on his skin, and with the forge quenched, it would make its way gradually back into this little chamber.

He wondered what had become of the smith, who had kept such impeccable tools, but seemingly found nothing worth taking with them.

There was probably not much to wonder. Little about Her was worth actually despising, but he could say in safety She had never been one to regard diligence or its fruit with any compassion.

Compassion.

What odd words stole their way into his mind expedited by the fervor of purpose. He was poor company now for the weapon he’d created; regardless, with none to reproach his weakness, the immaculate haft of it struck yielding mycelium, and it entered its first task in his hands: that of a walking stick, to carry him home.


	12. Closer To The Dark

He swam the canals rather than climb island to island as he had the way out. It would not take him further than the docks, still needing to climb the lifts to the storerooms, and once there, the long haul to the crossroads-

His eyes narrowed in the inky gloom of the water. Just to think about it that much was exhausting. Would it be a sin, truly, to bare his unseemly visage before any surviving stags and beg transit from them? They owed him something, he hoped- or perhaps they simply needn’t know their passenger’s identity. Even the indecency of being carried on another’s back was little compared to the increasingly tantalizing notion of traveling some leg of his journey  _ not _ on his own power.

A blast of light above scattered his thoughts before it; in an instant he reoriented in the water, tails flared and the weapon in his hands- 

Silence. Voices, carried and distorted by the water, as little as they had to say; a grunt and an answer.

Time ticked infuriatingly. There was nothing he could see; and, yet, also, he had beheld these waters from above them before. Their surface hid him now, so he could assure, for the most part, the blindness was mutual.

Hold, or observe. Risk, for clarity, or stay at bay, and preserve an already wounded body.

Until what? Until recovery? There was only so much better he was going to get, and that was presuming the simple healing of lower beings was not already beyond him.

He surfaced, clinging on the broadside of a stone walkway. It was empty, as were its surrounding islets- no, not quite. There, in the distance; a figure, not towering as a guard of the royal quarter, but impressive to the standard bug. Gray armor, a sloped, rounded head- and, yes, the glimmer of a white stone above duller eyes when it turned in his direction.

For a moment, their gazes held. His mouth, suddenly dry, reminded him of  _ prey _ , of the taste of blood- 

-the burden that the soldier carried squirmed, and they shifted the sacking slightly, turned away, and moved on, vanishing into the grey-blue.

The former king waited until he was certain that his civilized side was firmly in control over instinct before he climbed onto the walkway and parted his own path, off to the elevator.

Whether or not he’d dearly love to tear into them all, that a heretic’s work would outlive his own, he pressed that beneath the resolve that he was in no state to show himself before an enemy- and if  _ he _ was alive, of every beast and bug that had once crossed Hallownest, then there was far more trouble in the kingdom than he thought.

And, there could be no dip in propriety to hail a stag. Not when he had to find out, first, who he trusted.

\--

**CHAPTER XII: CLOSER TO THE DARK**

\--

He had exposed himself in carelessness exactly once before Her, and She had seared lesson to the contrary into his then-young body with a greater pain than he had known before or since. The tongues of mortal bug, in their earnestness to furnish meaning, simply failed to convey what he had known at that instant, what faint echoes had troubled him in years beyond from the point of injury. There had been those in his kingdom who believed him incapable of feeling pain; in reality, when nothing could compare to an agony already felt, a creature simply lost care for the lesser suffering of the world.

That all said, his present state was rather exquisite. It rang him from the inside out like a bell, and carried demands that wouldn’t accept waiting until he returned to the Crossroads and its wayward, ill-fated village.

The truth, however he might roll it about his fingers, was that for all of his years and wisdom, he had no experience managing base needs. Not when they could simply by either will or sorcery be swatted aside. Now, the will was weak, and the body howled and paced itself- with pain, with exhaustion, with  _ endless needs _ \- and that which he might have used before seemed dreadful to reinstate if he had even had the means to do so. The notion of bidding a retainer to carry him, it had never…

…No, it had… happened, once, he thought. In the expeditions against the Beast, the knights…

Ogrim. More loyal than proper, more compassionate than perceptive of his place. The only person in several centuries who would think, for a moment, to simply seize his fallen king, hiked upon one broad shoulder as if he had merely been another projectile. That day had ruined a perfectly serviceable overrobe.

And, he supposed, saved his life.

In the present, his light trailed pensively over the damp and rain-slicked pavers as it once had over the barbarian furls of Deepnest. 

It would be worse, if Ogrim was here. Irreparably worse.

...would he blame him, for anything? For the silence? For the bodies? For his failure, and deterioration? 

He sought to bring his hand to his face, a moment’s darkness to steady his thoughts. Instead, the old scar caught his eye, the four-pointed crown, ever-so-faintly darker than the chitin plates about it. White, but never to glow again.

“...I promised.”

That hand disappeared, back under his cloak. A promise he hadn’t kept to anyone; alone was what he would have to make progress with now.

Hunger and pain were his enemies. As petty as it felt to set his schedule around them, if they were allowed to run amok without fail they brought his thoughts to such places. He mustered himself, and with a final look above, he advanced, instead, through the rotting corridors, past the fountain square, the belly of the watcher’s spire, and below, retracing his steps down the broken lift shaft he had climbed.

He wondered if the industrious earth-mover had designs to repair this- the crushed elevator, and the sundered bridge beyond it. The elevator at least, the pulley held, the counterweight still hung- the cage broken, but its floor…

He supposed there were few reasons one would trifle with the Abyss. Little for a practical sort to want there. He had fancied it practical once, and…

With hesitation, he moved his cloak aside. Darkness had seeped through the bandages. A reminder that his current comfort was a loan, not a victory.

See where it had left him.

There was nowhere to go but forwards, so forwards he went, across the bridge, up gutters, and down, back to where, if memory served…

A solitary mawlek was scratching about the earth above its hole, not waiting for him to come down to it. It reared itself on its squat legs, growled, and made to lunge.

The work he made of it was efficient, and the tang of blood in the air as he drew back the spear with its nearly intact body ripe for harvest coaxed his mandibles a half-inch beyond his mask.

Not yet, he bid it, set the mawlek aside, and descended into the burrow itself to flush out and strike a second. The assembled pile of meat stood the height of his crown, and regarding it led him to consider what the populace of the city was wont to  _ do _ with food- trivialities of heat and seasoning, preparation and arrangement. Things he had been beneath as a wyrm, and beyond as a king. Now neither, it seemed ludicrous that he had understood the grand and minuscule workings of the city, but not the functions of its kitchens. The notion of hunting and hunting again, forsaking all other projects simply to keep fed, warred up against the inconvenience of attempting, by his own limbs and arts, to learn how to prepare food, make arrangement or shelter to set it aside-

-and how exactly did creatures with such a short life as the common bug find the time to learn and do all of this? Was this what drove them to live in such teeming masses- to differentiate the weight of so much busywork that bodies even far smaller than his true size demanded?

Perhaps his past self had been naive. Perhaps a city was merely an exaggerated function of base needs.

With shining tool in hand, he set on the first of his prey, and began the work of shelling and boning a larger creature. The familiar rhythm of anatomy and its disassembly kept his mind busy, and the promise of a meal paid at last kept his thoughts off for a time, but in repose before he turned his attention to the second, they came flooding back in.

Had he ever balked, before, at the weight of knowing something? Even his failing body might yet hold him out for one season, another… he had not bothered to mind the rate of his decay, to try and note its course on slate or dictated into a whispering glyph; at the time it had seemed an inevitable end far off was the same as an end now, except that in the present it could have been faced with dignity. 

Well. That had flown. He was eating a dead animal in a tramway, with visage scored and traveler’s rags made of his palace robes. And there was simply too much to ascertain about the situation- a heretic’s survival, the desecration of a temple, the surging of the void… he could not simply lie down and perish now.

So, then, what did he have to lose? 

Or, a better question, what was his path forwards? He made of the second mawlek as he had the first, this time setting aside and contemplating the bones and shell. Small residue of murky hemolymph lingered on the point of his chin; he passed his thumb over it with a small amount of light, and considered the straps of cloth by which he’d brought the ruffian’s nails down to the forge and carried his newly-made weapon since. He unslung them, contemplated the bodies, and sorted the pieces most useful- the mostly-intact legs, which had little flesh worth prying them open for, and the teeth, fine and sharp. Sections of shell on one were yet joined by skin; they could fasten a sort of basket that could hold the rest. He nearly left behind the acid-carrying bladders, but considered; one was still bright with orange ichor, and the other was empty, but its membrane intact. In they went. After several more deliberations, his selection was not as light as expected.

There was nothing for it; any answers he might seek were above and beyond- his shelter, the enigma Vigna, the emptied temple and the final resting grounds of the three chosen dreamers.

The only one to have spoken to him, and, yet, she had… associates. Subjects, he would not intimate, but certainly those who felt her absence enough to come after her. He did not trust his position enough to avail himself on the mercy of that whole community, but Vigna… that was one to pry at matters. 

Up it was, then. And up was an exhausting prospect. He had eaten, but food did not pour itself directly from the stomach into the veins in the form of soul. It had its… corporeality to be negotiated. He would have to rest, before rising. 

He looked to his left. The mawlek warren was rather deep and voluminous; twice now he had come, and twice there had been new creatures to greet him. It was a robust colony that had taken roost here, and if that were the case, they would be robust in hunting, and it would exhaust him further to chase down and butcher each and every individual one- not to mention a waste of potential resources.

He looked right. The metal platform rose steeply, enough to discourage most climbing creatures, and above it, the still and silent body of the tram.

If there was a small grace, it was that his own works could at least  _ sometimes _ acknowledge him. 

He settled the basket behind him and stretched up on his segments to grab the walkway, being able to manage the most of it in two pulls that minimally jostled his chest. Approaching the doors of the tram, he paused, lingering by its card reader.

He had designed this system. With care and consideration, that the tram passes could not be easily fabricated. The teeth of each pass, precisely machined by a device that had been kept within the palace, and now, as every useful thing he had kept there, no doubt torn asunder and withered by the force of dream and its eclipse. And here he was, every appendage empty of a means to bid the doors open, knowing precisely what efforts the doors and walls were designed to withstand.

If he could only get in there, it would be a fortress upon itself. 

He contemplated the key slot once more, gathering soul and rolling it experimentally about his fingertips. It would be a very complex construct, and need to hold its form…

Gripping the inlay that bracketed the slot, the former king willed his creation to heed him.

His power wicked away from him quietly into the dark. Seconds crawled, but minutes flew; in the end he could not say how long it had been.

Fingers began to shake. Something rose in his throat that sickened him to consider, an unvoiced plea to the silence. He tightened, pressed, fixed the image more clearly in his mind and spoke the only bright word that the tram would heed,  _ should _ heed, needed heed- 

-what possible other purpose could it have found, alone in the silence at the bottom of the world-

The mechanism obliged so abruptly that it left him falling forwards, catching himself on four elbows on the metal flooring. It should not have been difficult- and yet, for some time, he simply breathed, trembling like a scrap of cloth caught in a storm.

In the obliging light of the tram, a single padded seat faced the door. The spent and desiccated corpse of a dirtcarver languished to the rear of the structure, but he hardly paid it mind, setting aside his weapon and his burden before gathering onto the exposed seat- 

-in petty indulgence, he wound his coils about his own body, tail resting like a shield in front of his stomach. 

The door slid closed, and, without second thought nor dark imploring, a labyrinth of white lines flowered over it. It would heed no one until he woke.

He lay back, and sought to dream no longer.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Pale Stranger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27155332) by [BetterBeMeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetterBeMeta/pseuds/BetterBeMeta)




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